I cannot describe to you the peculiar effect of the summer upon one unacclimated. You feel as though you were breathing a drugged atmosphere. You find the very whites of your eyes turning yellow with biliousness. The least over-indulgence in eating or drinking prostrates you. My feeling all through the time of the epidemic was about this: I have the fever-principle in my blood,—it shows its presence in a hundred ways,—if the machinery of the body gets the least out of order, the fever will get me down. I was not afraid of serious consequences, but I felt conscious that nothing but strict attention to the laws of health would pull me through. The experience has been valuable. I believe I could now live in Havana or Vera Cruz without fear of the terrible fevers which prevail there. Do you know that even here we have no less than eleven different kinds of fever,—most of which know the power of killing?
I am very glad winter is coming, to lift the languors of the air and restore some energy to us. The summer is not like that North. At the North you have a clear, dry, burning air; here it is clear also, but dense, heavy, and so moist that it is never so hot as you have it. But no one dares expose himself to the vertical sun. I have noticed that even the chickens and the domestic animals, dogs, cats, etc., always seek shady places. They fear the sun. People with valuable horses will not work them much in summer. They die very rapidly of sunstroke.
In winter, too, one feels content. There is no nostalgia. But the summer always brings with it to me—always has, and I suppose always will—a curious and vague species of homesickness, as if I had friends in some country far off, where I had not been for so long that I have forgotten even their names and the appellation of the place where they live. I hope it will be so next summer that I can go whither the humour leads me,—the propensity which the author of “The Howadji in Syria” calleth the Spirit of the Camel.
But this is a land where one can really enjoy the Inner Life. Every one has an inner life of his own,—which no other eye can see, and the great secrets of which are never revealed, although occasionally when we create something beautiful, we betray a faint glimpse of it—sudden and brief, as of a door opening and shutting in the night. I suppose you live such a life, too,—a double existence—a dual entity. Are we not all doppelgängers?—and is not the invisible the only life we really enjoy?
You may remember I described this house to you as haunted-looking. It is delicious, therefore, to find out that it is actually a haunted house. But the ghosts do not trouble me; I have become so much like one of themselves in my habits. There is one room, however, where no one likes to be alone; for phantom hands clap, and phantom feet stamp behind them. "And what does that signify?” I asked a servant. “Ça veut dire, Foulez-moi le camp”—a vulgar expression for “Git!”
There is to be a literary (God save the mark!) newspaper here. I have been asked to help edit it. As I find that I can easily attend to both papers I shall scribble and scrawl and sell ’em translations which I could not otherwise dispose of. Thus I shall soon be making, instead of $40, about $100 per month. This will enable me to accumulate the means of flying from American civilization to other horrors which I know not of—some place where one has to be a good Catholic (in outward appearance) for fear of having a navaja stuck into you, and where the whole population is so mixed up that no human being can tell what nation anybody belongs to. So in the meantime I must study such phrases as:——
¿Tiene V. un leoncito? Have you a small lion?
No señor, pero tengo un fero perro. No: but I’ve an ugly dog.
¿Tiene V. un muchachona? Have you a big strapping girl?
No: pero tengo un hombrecillo. No: but I’ve a miserable little man.