And I've to get a year's dead sticks out of the wood, and see to the new oat field on the moor, and prepare lectures for October!
I'm so idle. I look at the hills out of bed, and at the pictures off the sofa. Let us both be useless beings; let us be butterflies, grasshoppers, lambs, larks, anything for an easy life. I'm quite horrified to see, now that these two have come back, what a lot of books I've written, and how cruel I've been to myself and everybody else who ever has to read them. I'm too sleepy to finish this note.
13th June.
I do not know when I have received, or how I could receive so great an encouragement in all my work, as I do in hearing that you, after all your long love and watchfulness of flowers, have yet gained [Pg 72] pleasure and insight from "Proserpina" as to leaf structure. The examples you send me are indeed admirable. Can you tell me the exact name of the plant, that I may quote it?
Yes, and the weather also is a great blessing to me—so lovely this morning.
I'm getting steadily better, and breathing the sunshine a little again in soul and lips. But I always feel so naughty after having had morning prayers, and that the whole house is a sort of little Bethel that I've no business in.
I'm reading history of early saints too, for my Amiens book, and feel that I ought to be scratched, or starved, or boiled, or something unpleasant, and I don't know if I'm a saint or a sinner in the least, in mediæval language. How did saints feel themselves, I wonder, about their saintship?