to Sidney Colvin

Newport, R. I. U.S.A. [September 1887].

MY DEAR COLVIN,—So long it went excellent well, and I had a time I am glad to have had; really enjoying my life.  There is nothing like being at sea, after all.  And O, why have I allowed myself to rot so long on land?  But on the Banks I caught a cold, and I have not yet got over it.  My reception here was idiotic to the last degree. . . .  It is very silly, and not pleasant, except where humour enters; and I confess the poor interviewer lads pleased me.  They are too good for their trade; avoided anything I asked them to avoid, and were no more vulgar in their reports than they could help.  I liked the lads.

O, it was lovely on our stable-ship, chock full of stallions.  She rolled heartily, rolled some of the fittings out of our state-room, and I think a more dangerous cruise (except that it was summer) it would be hard to imagine.  But we enjoyed it to the masthead, all but Fanny; and even she perhaps a little.  When we got in, we had run out of beer, stout, cocoa, soda-water, water, fresh meat, and (almost) of biscuit.  But it was a thousandfold pleasanter than a great big Birmingham liner like a new hotel; and we liked the officers, and made friends with the quartermasters, and I (at least) made a friend of a baboon (for we carried a cargo of apes), whose embraces have pretty near cost me a coat.  The passengers improved, and were a very good specimen lot, with no drunkard, no gambling that I saw, and less grumbling and backbiting than one would have asked of poor human nature.  Apes, stallions, cows, matches, hay, and poor men-folk, all, or almost all, came successfully to land.—Yours ever,

R. L. S.