2 8 A SPORTSMAN'S EDEN. 



LETTER III. 



Victoria, 



British Columbia. 

 DEAR LENA, 



It is almost impossible to believe that 

 I am not dreaming. Sitting by the open window, 

 the drowsy summer air comes in off the sea and 

 fans my forehead ; from the lawn outside I can 

 hear, ' Well played,' ' Love thirty,' ' Deuce,' and 

 other scraps of tennis jargon from lips of Eng- 

 lish men and women. In fancy I can see the 

 gray stone walls of your old English rectory and 

 its wreaths of blue clematis ; but if I open my 

 eyes, they look, it is true, across green tennis- 

 lawns and past English players, but the skies are 

 bluer than those skies of Gloucestershire ever 

 were ; instead of the Cotswold hills are the snow 

 caps of the Olympian mountains, the houses 

 round me are of timber instead of stone, and just 

 beyond are pine-forests, in which the trees are 

 so vast that a single one of them contains 

 almost as much timber as stands in an English 

 wood. 



