to W. E. Henley

Wensleydale, Bournemouth, November 1884.

DEAR HENLEY,—We are all to pieces in health, and heavily handicapped with Arabs.  I have a dreadful cough, whose attacks leave me ætat. 90.  I never let up on the Arabs, all the same, and rarely get less than eight pages out of hand, though hardly able to come downstairs for twittering knees.

I shall put in —’s letter.  He says so little of his circumstances that I am in an impossibility to give him advice more specific than a copybook.  Give him my love, however, and tell him it is the mark of the parochial gentleman who has never travelled to find all wrong in a foreign land.  Let him hold on, and he will find one country as good as another; and in the meanwhile let him resist the fatal British tendency to communicate his dissatisfaction with a country to its inhabitants.  ’Tis a good idea, but it somehow fails to please.  In a fortnight, if I can keep my spirit in the box at all, I should be nearly through this Arabian desert; so can tackle something fresh.—Yours ever,

R. L. S.