I enjoyed Widow Robertshaw's hospitality, perforce, for two days, and when I returned home it was in Mr. Higgins' market cart, he having called in the Gap "casual-like" to see how Mrs. Robertshaw was "going on."
What a curious medley life is! How crowded with dramatic situations and sudden anti-climaxes! Even in Windyridge the programme of existence is as varied and full of interest as that of any picture palace. We have all the combinations of tragedy and pathos and humour, and he who has eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to feel need not complain of the monotony of the village, nor pine for the manufactured excitements of the metropolis.
A letter with a foreign postmark and an Egyptian stamp was handed to me on Monday morning, and I have been excited and troubled ever since, though it brought me a great joy. The handwriting was unfamiliar, but when I turned to the signature I found it was from the squire, and I began to read it eagerly. I was astonished to find how small and particularly neat his handwriting is.
The letter ran thus, omitting certain descriptive and unimportant paragraphs:
"Assouan, Upper Nile, "_March_ 12_th_, 19--.
"I wonder if I might claim an old man's privilege and call you 'Grace'? I should like to do so, for do you know there is not one of your sex in the wide world whom I have a right to address by the Christian name, and, what is perhaps more noteworthy, there is no other whose permission I have the least desire to ask. But somehow or other I am longing for kinsfolk to-day, and the sensation is almost inexpressibly acute, so much so that I actually feel the pain of loneliness, and that 'Inner Self' in which, I remember, you trust so completely, cries out for sympathy and companionship. If I mistake not we have common ideals and aspirations--you and I--which make us kin, and I am disposed to 'stretch out lame hands of faith' in your direction if haply I may find you and draw your soul to mine. So if it be your will, let us be friends, and do you send across the seas and deserts those mysterious waves of kindly feeling which will vibrate upon the heart of the solitary old man, to whom earth's messages of love come but seldom--now.
"Have I ever told you that I have not a relative on earth, and that I have outlived all my own friends? I sometimes feel to be like these old monuments on the banks of Nile, which stand calm and impassive whilst the children of this age picnic around their ruins; yet I am no patriarch, for I have not much overstepped the natural span of man's existence. I hope you may never experience the sensation, but the fact that you are yourself amongst earth's lone ones is not the least of the links that connect you to me.