with meanings puzzles one. Humming-
bug, the candles are not wired for electricity.
Small dog, going over the lawn, nipping the linen and saying
that you have a badger—remember Xenophon;
only the most rudimentary sort of behaviour is necessary
to put us on the scent; a "right good
salvo of barks," a few "strong wrinkles" puckering the
skin between the ears, are all we ask.
ENGLAND
with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its
cathedral;
with voices—one voice perhaps, echoing through the
transept—the
criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy with its equal
shores—contriving an epicureanism from which the grossness
has been
extracted: and Greece with its goats and its gourds, the nest of
modified illusions:
and France, the “‘chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly’”” in
whose products, mystery of construction diverts one from what was
originally one’s
object—substance at the core: and the East with its snails, its
emotional
shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its
imperturbability,
all of museum quality: and America where there
is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars are
smoked on the
street in the north; where there are no proof-readers, no silk-
worms, no digressions ;
the wild man’s land; grass-less, links-less, language-less country—
in which letters are written
not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand
