Vailima Letters Volume 2 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 Excerpt: ...TO THE MEMORY OF J. L. HUISH, BORN 1856, AT HACKNEY, LONDON, Accidentally killed upon this Island, 10th September, 1889. Tuesday, 6. I am exulting to do nothing. It pours with rain from the westward, very unusual kind of weather; I was standing out on the little verandah in front of my room this L893 J June morning, and there went through me or over me a wave of extraordinary and apparently baseless emotion. I literally staggered. And then the explanation came, and I knew I had found a frame of mind and body that belonged to Scotland, and particularly to the neighbourhood of Callander. Very odd these identities of sensation, and the world of connotations implied; highland huts, and peat smoke, and the brown, swirling rivers, and wet clothes, and whiskey, and the romance of the past, and that indescribable bite of the whole thing at a man's heart, which is--or rather lies at the bottom of--a story. I don't know if you are a Barbey d'Aurevilly-an. I am. I have a great delight in his Norman stories. Do you know the Chevalier des Touches and L'EnsorceUe? They are admirable, they reek of the soil and the past. But I was rather thinking just now of Le Rideau Cramoisi, and its adorable setting of the VOL. II.--10 1893 stopped coach, the dark street, the homeJune going in the inn yard, and the red blind illuminated. Without doubt, there was an identity of sensation; one of those conjunctions in life that had filled Barbey full to the brim, and permanently bent his memory. I wonder exceedingly if I have done anything at all good; and who can tell me? and why should I wish to know? In so little a while, I, and the English language, and the bones of my descendants, will have ceased to be a memory And yet--and yet--one would like to leave an image for a few years upon...