I had contemplated spending the winter in a voyage up the Amazon, but abandoned it in favour of one down the east coast of South America. Teixeira comments, 29.10.20:
Your new voyage is the more sensible and interesting by far. What’s Amazon to you or you to Amazon? I pictured you and trembled for you, steaming slowly up that mighty river between alligators taking pot-shots at you with poisoned pea-shooters from one bank and hummingbirds yapping split infinitives at you from the other. You will be much better off on board your goodish coasting tramp....
... It interested me, he adds, 30.10.20, to read in this morning’s Times that Brazilian stock has risen a couple of points at the news of your contemplated visit. I hope that Argentine rails will follow suit....
[A lady] when returning Shane Leslie’s book, which I had lent to her and she enjoyed ... had the asinine effrontery to write to me ... of “McSwiney’s farcical death.” Isn’t it dreadful to think that the world has given birth to women who can write like that?
Can death ever be farcical? We know that the epithet is wholly inapposite in the present instance. But can death ever be farcical? I told you, I think, of Major Johnson, who, throwing hot coppers from the balcony of the Grand Hôtel in Paris at the crowd cheering Kruger, overbalanced himself, fell to the pavement and was killed. That is the nearest approach to a farcical death that I can think of. But I should call it ironical. A farcical death. Alas!...
On 31.10.20 he writes:
I fear you will have a hell of a windy time at Deal or Dover or wherever Walmer Castle has its being (Walmer perhaps, as an afterthought)? It is blowing half a gale here. The Dutch say “to lie like a horse-thief.” The English ought to say “to lie like a guide-book.” One lies before me at this moment:
“In fact, Ventnor is a sun-box; and the east and north winds would have to confess that they have not even a visiting acquaintance with her.”
At the same moment, these self-same winds are “a-sharting in my ear”:
“We don’t confess to nothink of the sort!