I am living so much down here that I fear I am losing hold of some of my few chances of occasionally seeing you. The charming old humble-minded "quaintness" and quietness of this little brown hilltop city lays a spell upon me. I send you and your wife and all your house all the greetings of the season and am, my dear Myers, yours very constantly,
I have gone on and on most abominably and inexorably owing you a letter since a date so distant that I associate the time intimately with the admirable summer, here, that we so long ago left behind and of which Harry will--at a period by this time quite prehistoric--have given you something of the pleasant little story. But the sense always abides with me that when I am for weeks and months together dumb--as I know I more than once _have_ been--you and William are quite _de force_ to read into it all the kindly extenuations I require. I have in fact, for many weeks, down here, been taking the general line of saving up all the cerebration not imperatively drained off from day to day for a long job that I have had to carry through under the nightmare of belatedness--a belatedness so great (produced by time lost originally in arranging this place, moving down, taking possession, etc.) as to leave me no margin whatever for accident, indisposition or languor. My capacity for the distillation of prose of decent quality remains, alas, with all the amendments time has brought it, still, each day, so limited that I get awfully nervous under a very continuous task unless I by certain flagrant sacrifices keep up to myself the fiction of freshness--of not getting simply _sick_, in other words, by adding any writing that I haven't absolutely to do to the quantity that _is_ each morning imposed. So the sacrifices, for a long time past, have been, as usual, my correspondence, and as the most tender morsels for the Moloch you and William naturally _en première ligne_. The Moloch at last, however--since these four or five days, has been temporarily appeased; and I have instantly begun to transfer my attention from one form of belatement to another. I am working off arrears of letters, and if I take you, dearest Alice, in the heap, I at least pay you the sweet tribute of taking you _first_. You have been without sign or sound of me so long that I daresay you may have even wild imaginings about my "location" and other conditions. I am located only just where Harry left me and where I have stuck fast since July last without the excision of twenty-four hours. The autumn and the early winter have followed the ardent summer here only to multiply my points of contact with my environment and to saturate me more deeply with the grateful sense of it. This contentment has defied all winds and weathers--in plenty of which we have for the last two months rejoiced. I like to send all our little news of such matters in the form of news to Harry in particular, whose mind is furnished with the proper little hooks for it to hold on by. Tell him then, since I won't attempt to burden him individually with acknowledgements that will overload him, that everything he fancied and fondled here only kept growing, all the autumn long, more adapted to such a relation, and that in short both the little brown city and the so amiable countryside were not in July and August a "patch," for charm, colour, "subtlety" and every kind of daily grace, to what they became, in an uninterrupted crescendo, all through October and November. All the good that I hoped of the place has, in fine, profusely bloomed and flourished here. It was really at about the end of September, when the various summer supernumeraries had quite faded away, that the special note of Rye, the feeling of the little hilltop community, bound together like a very modest, obscure and impecunious, but virtuous and amiable family, began most unmistakably to come out. This is the present note of life here, and it has floated me (excuse mixture of metaphor) very placidly along. Nothing would induce me now _not_ to be here for Christmas and nothing will induce me not to do my best at least to be here for the protrusion of the bulbs--the hyacinths and tulips and crocuses--that, in return for expended shillings, George Gammon promises me for the earliest peep of spring. As he has broken no word with me yet, I trust him implicitly for this. Meantime too I have trusted him, all the autumn, for all sorts of other things as well: we have committed to the earth together innumerable unsightly roots and sprigs that I am instructed to depend upon as the fixed foundation of a future herbaceous and perennial paradise. Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.