And to think that you will be eight, ten or twenty thousand miles away, after next year!
Woke up this morning feeling younger—not quite fifty years of age. Gradually the sense of age will return: when I feel about sixty again—which will be soon—I shall run down to see you.
Want to say that those cigars of the doctor’s are too good for me: luxury, luxury, luxury. The ruin of empires! But I like a little of it—not too often—once in a year. It makes me buoyant, imponderable—fly in day dreams.
And I want to see Bedloe. Do not, if you can help it, fail to come up again, once anyhow, before the good year dies. Only this word of love to you.
In haste,
Lafcadio.
TO PROFESSOR FOXWELL
Tōkyō, October, 1899.
Dear Professor,—I had given up all expectation of seeing you again in Japan,—as a letter received from Mr. Edwards gave me to understand that you were on your way back to England. To-day, however, I learned by chance that you were still in Tōkyō,—though no longer an inhabitant of the Palace of Woe. Therefore I must convey to you by this note Mr. Edwards’s best regards, and express my own regret that you will not again help me through with a single one of those dreary quarters between classes. However, I suppose that the day of my own emancipation cannot be extremely remote.
I have had a number of pleasant letters from that wonderful American friend of ours. He has been in Siam,—where he sold to the King’s people more than two tons of dictionaries without emerging from the awning of his carriage; and I suppose that the books were carried by a white elephant with six tusks. He has been since then in Ceylon, Madras, Calcutta,—all sorts of places, too, ending in “bad,”—doing business. But he will not return to Japan—he goes to the Mediterranean. He sent me a box of cigars of Colombo: they are a little “sharp,” but very nice—strange in flavour, but fine.