Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/493

84 Italian peasant is not better off, but worse off (taking one year with another), than his brother of Iceland!"

In connexion with this Icelandic famine and the work of the Mansion House Committee there is a most characteristic note to Ellis written from Kelmscott on the 29th of September. It should perhaps be explained that there had been correspondence in the London papers making little of the distress in Iceland, and questioning whether there were in fact any famine at all there. Mr. Magnusson had just started for Reykjavik with the money and provisions already collected, in order to investigate matters on the spot.

"I am so vexed that you should have had all this trouble; except for the circumstances which you know of, I would have made a point of staying in London and seeing the matter through. I cannot find that beastly letter. When I saw you Monday week I put what letters I thought would be wanted into an envelope which I intended to give you, but I was so muddled by my own troubles that I daresay I did not; nor can I be sure that the letter was in it. Meantime I have written a letter to the bloody Times which I also inclose; if you think it worth while please send it on; after which I really don't see what any of us can do till Magnusson comes back. I repeat I am so vexed that you should have been let in for such worrits—I am reminded of Swinburne's view of providence when he said that he never saw an old gentleman give a sixpence to a beggar, but he was straightway run over by a 'bus."

But apart from all private anxieties, the pressure on Morris's mind during these autumn and winter months seems from several indications to have been greater