RAH. AL WEL.


Haliburton said he could not waste flat or cambric on
spelling.

He had had all night since half-past ten to consider
what next was most important for them to know; and a very
difficult question it was, you will observe. They had
been gone nearly two years, and much had happened. Which
thing was, on the whole, the most interesting and
important? He had said we were all well. What then?

Did you never find yourself in the same difficulty?
When your husband had come home from sea, and kissed you
and the children, and wondered at their size, did you
never sit silent and have to think what you should say?
Were you never fairly relieved when little Phil said,
blustering, "I got three eggs to-day." The truth is,
that silence is very satisfactory intercourse, if we only
know all is well. When De Sauty got his original cable
going, he had not much to tell after all; only that
consols were a quarter per cent higher than they were
the day before. "Send me news," lisped he--poor lonely
myth!--from Bull's Bay to Valentia,--"send me news; they
are mad for news." But how if there be no news worth
sending? What do I read in my cable despatch to-day?
Only that the Harvard crew pulled at Putney yesterday,
which I knew before I opened the paper, and that there
had been a riot in Spain, which I also knew. Here is a