Charming and "gracious" your letter, and welcome sign of your restoration in more senses than one. Though I see you, alas, nowadays, at such intervals, I feel this extremely individual little island to be appreciably less its characteristic self when you are away from it, and sensibly more so, and breathing the breath of relief, when it gets you back and plumps you down with a fond "There!" on your high hilltop, a beacon-like depository of traditions no one else so admirably embodies. Your invitation to come and share for a few days your paradise with you finds me, I am very sorry to say, in a hindered and helpless moment. I am obliged to recognise the stern fact that I _can't_ leave home just now. I have had a complicated and quite overwhelmed summer--agreeably, interestingly, anxiously and worriedly, even; but inevitably and logically--waves of family history, a real deluge, having rolled over my bowed head and left me, as to the question of work, production, time, ease and other matters, quite high and dry. I went on Saturday last to Dover to see my sister-in-law off to the Continent--and as she took a night boat had to stop there over Sunday, at the too-familiar (and too other things) Lord Warden; after which I came back to bury (yes, bury!) my precious, my admirable little Peter, whom I think you had met. (He passed away on Sunday at St. Leonard's, fondly attended by the local "canine specialist"--after three days of dreadful little dysentery.) Thus is constituted the first moment of my being by myself for about four months. It may last none too long, and is, already, to be tempered by the palpable presence of Gosse from Saturday p.m. to Monday next. So, with arrears untold, in every direction, with preoccupations but just temporarily arranged, I feel that I absolutely _must_ sit close for a good many weeks to come; in fact till the New Year--after which I depart. I don't quite know what becomes of me then, but I don't, distinctly, for a third year, hibernate here. My London rooms are as probably as sordidly let for 1901 (though not to a certainty,) and it will (my wretched fate--not _fat_--_fate_) depend more or less upon that. My brother, ill, but thank God, better, wants me to come to Egypt with him and his wife for 12 weeks--his health demanding it, but he only going if I will accompany him. So the pistol is at my head. Will it bring me down? I've a positive terror of it. The alternatives are Rome (of which I've a still greater terror than of Egypt, for it's an equal complication and less reward,) or De Vere Gardens, or a more squalid perch in town if De V.G. are closed to me. The latter, the last-named, doom is what I really want. If I should, clingingly, clutchingly, stick to these shores, I might _then_, were it agreeable to you, be able to put in three days of Underbank, which I've never seen in its tragic winter mood. But these things are in the lap of the gods.