to Charles Baxter

[Chalet am Stein], Davos, December 5, 1881.

MY DEAR CHARLES,—We have been in miserable case here; my wife worse and worse; and now sent away with Lloyd for sick nurse, I not being allowed to go down.  I do not know what is to become of us; and you may imagine how rotten I have been feeling, and feel now, alone with my weasel-dog and my German maid, on the top of a hill here, heavy mist and thin snow all about me, and the devil to pay in general.  I don’t care so much for solitude as I used to; results, I suppose, of marriage.

Pray write me something cheery.  A little Edinburgh gossip, in Heaven’s name.  Ah! what would I not give to steal this evening with you through the big, echoing, college archway, and away south under the street lamps, and away to dear Brash’s, now defunct!  But the old time is dead also, never, never to revive.  It was a sad time too, but so gay and so hopeful, and we had such sport with all our low spirits and all our distresses, that it looks like a kind of lamplit fairyland behind me.  O for ten Edinburgh minutes—sixpence between us, and the ever-glorious Lothian Road, or dear mysterious Leith Walk!  But here, a sheer hulk, lies poor Tom Bowling; here in this strange place, whose very strangeness would have been heaven to him then; and aspires, yes, C. B., with tears, after the past.  See what comes of being left alone.  Do you remember Brash? the sheet of glass that we followed along George Street?  Granton? the blight at Bonny mainhead? the compass near the sign of the Twinkling Eye? the night I lay on the pavement in misery?

                  I swear it by the eternal sky
Johnson—nor Thomson—ne’er shall die!

Yet I fancy they are dead too; dead like Brash.

R. L. S.