Page:Letters from Abroad.pdf/70

 61

Pearson is away, My correspondence and other works have grown heavy: and therefore you will have to bear with me, if my letters become scarce or scrappy.

After a break of three weeks and a sultriness of weary waiting, your letters have come in a downpour; and I cannot possibly tell you how refreshing they are! I seem to be travelling across a desert, and your letters are like weekly provisions dropped by some air-service from cloud-land. They are expected ; and yet they have the element of surprise. I hungrily attack them and then fall upon extra portions supplied from your letters written to others.

Your letters are delightful, because you have your interest in details that are generally overlooked. The world is made beautiful by the unimportant things. They furnish this great world-picture with all its modulations of shades and tints. The important is like the sunshine. It comes from a great source. But the unimportant composes the atmosphere of our life. It scatters the sun’s rays, breaks it into colours, and coaxes it into tenderness.

You have asked for my permission to abolish the matriculation class from our school. Let it go, I have no tenderness for it. In our classical literature, it was the strict rule to give all dramas