a weed, but I invent a sentence on the matter to yourself; it
does not get written; _autant en emportent les vents_; but the
intent is there, and for me (in some sort) the companionship.
To-day, for instance, we had a great talk. I was toiling, the
sweat dripping from my nose, in the hot fit after a squall of
rain; methought you asked me--frankly, was I happy? Happy (said
I); I was only happy once; that was at Hyères; it came to an end
from a variety of reasons--decline of health, change of place,
increase of money, age with his stealing steps; since then, as
before then, I know not what it means. But I know pleasures
still; pleasure with a thousand faces and none perfect, a
thousand tongues all broken, a thousand hands, and all of them
with scratching nails. High among these I place the delight of
weeding out here alone by the garrulous water, under the silence
of the high wood, broken by incongruous sounds of birds. And take
my life all through, look at it fore and back, and upside down--I
would not change my circumstances, unless it were to bring you
here. And yet God knows perhaps this intercourse of writing
serves as well; and I wonder, were you here indeed, would I
commune so continually with the thought of you. I say 'I wonder'
for a form; I know, and I know I should not."

In a way the beauty of these letters is this, that they tell us so
much of Stevenson that is new, and nothing that is strange--nothing
that we have difficulty in reconciling with the picture we had already
formed in our own minds. Our mental portraits of some other writers,
drawn from their deliberate writings, have had to be readjusted, and
sometimes most cruelly readjusted, as soon as their private
correspondence came to be published. If any of us dreamed of this
danger in Stevenson's case (and I doubt if anyone did), the danger at