JUNE 20TH.


No diary this time. Why? you ask. I have only sent out four
Letters, and two chapters of the WRECKER. Yes, but to get
these I have written 132 pp., 66,000 words in thirty days;
2200 words a day; the labours of an elephant. God knows what
it's like, and don't ask me, but nobody shall say I have
spared pains. I thought for some time it wouldn't come at
all. I was days and days over the first letter of the lot -
days and days writing and deleting and making no headway
whatever, till I thought I should have gone bust; but it came
at last after a fashion, and the rest went a thought more
easily, though I am not so fond as to fancy any better.

Your opinion as to the letters as a whole is so damnatory
that I put them by. But there is a 'hell of a want of' money
this year. And these Gilbert Island papers, being the most
interesting in matter, and forming a compact whole, and being
well illustrated, I did think of as a possible resource.

It would be called


SIX MONTHS IN MELANESIA,
TWO ISLAND KINGS,
- MONARCHIES,
GILBERT ISLAND KINGS,
- MONARCHIES,