Page:Tom Beauling (1901).pdf/128

 up and down hill for three or four hours you catch the elk—at bay in a pool of the river!—and stick him until he is dead, and come home triumphanstriumphant [sic]. I couldn't go because as yet I can't walk for two or three hours, let alone run. But good times are coming, and, between you and me, the elk which I have pictured as a foeman worthy of any steel is a kind of bashful, black-eyed gazel about three feet high.

I am writing to you from a deep chair, on a wide veranda which overlooks the whole valley. But the view is halved by a famous keena tree, which, though not very tall, is thirty-six feet around the base and discouraging to one in search of wide prospects. So I content me with what is near at hand, a hedge of heliotrope as high as my shoulder, a hedge of calla-lilies—a bright-green lizard is shining in the cup of one—and an amiable yellow chow-dog, who has been stalking lizards for fifteen years and is still waggishly afraid.

The pearls are on view at a banker's