as well as unseemly to violate in print the freemasonry of marriage.--
The second, not unlike the first, is not to write about living people.
And here am I hard at it in both cases!

Yet, after all, I have kept to my resolve in the spirit, if not in the
letter:--and this though it has cost me some very good "copy,"--copy,
too, which would have afforded me the pleasantest of memories. There are
things seen by us together which I much regret to leave unchronicled,
but these must wait for another occasion. Many of them are quite
suitable to be recorded in one's lifetime. For example, I should dearly
like to set forth our ride from Jerusalem to Damascus, together with
some circumstances, as an old-fashioned traveller might have said,
concerning the Garden of the Jews at Jahoni, and the strange and
beautiful creature we found therein.

I count myself happy indeed to have seen half the delightful and notable
things I have seen during my life, in your company. Do you remember the
turbulent magnificence of our winter passage of the Splügen, not in a
snowstorm, but in something much more thrilling--a fierce windstorm in a
great frost? The whirling, stinging, white dust darkened the air and
coated our sledges, our horses, and our faces. We shall neither of us
ever forget how just below the Hospice your sledge was actually blown
over by the mere fury of the blizzard; how we tramped through the
drifts, and how all ended in "the welcome of an inn" on the summit; the
hot soup and the _Côtelettes de Veau_. It was together, too, that
we watched the sunrise from the Citadel at Cairo and saw the Pyramids
tipped with rose and saffron. Ours, too, was the desert mirage that, in
spite of reason and experience, almost betrayed us in our ride to the
Fayum. You shared with me what was certainly an adventure of the spirit,
though not of the body, when for the first time we saw the fateful and