II Incomplete Literatu7'e 39 



he came not to it at all, — and then, after those few- 

 months, with his wife, his two children, and his many 

 books, he turned his face seawards again and started 

 off to the Rocky Mountains, the West Indies, Nova 

 Scotia, the Mediterranean, South Africa, or the South 

 Seas, or some other far distant region of the globe. 

 It is a matter of regret that he, a man gifted with 

 such keen powers of observation and such sensitive- 

 ness to the beauty of nature, should have almost 

 utterly forsaken the pen for the fishing-rod, the 

 mustang, and the rifle during this the most interesting 

 period of his life. With the exception of some of 

 the chapters of South Sea Bubbles and a few magazine 

 articles, which he composed in order to amuse himself 

 during his short periods of leisure, the only existing 

 records of his wanderings consist in the letters he 

 wrote, with no thought of their ultimate publication, 

 in foreign hotels, log huts, and soldiers' tents in the 

 Far West, and the cabins of yachts and mail steamers ; 

 the MSS. of three or four articles which he threw 

 unfinished into the waste-paper basket, whence they 

 were rescued by his wife or his daughter ; and an old 

 diary, or ' log,' as he used to call it, literally ' rough 

 as hatched in the storms of the ocean and feathered 

 on the surges of many perilous seas ' (to quote Tom 

 Lodge's description of his Euphues' Golden Legacie), 

 covered with green and purple patches, mementoes 

 of a sojourn which it once enjoyed on a coral reef 

 beneath the waves of the South Pacific Ocean. It 

 is therefore impossible to give anything better than 



