Last Years. 383 



38 QUEEN'S GARDENS, May 27, 1884. 



MY DEAR YOUMANS : I saw Mr. Appleton a week or 

 more ago, and he gave me an unfavourable report of you. 

 I had not gathered from your accounts of yourself that the 

 winter had so much told upon your lungs as to cause such 

 an increased difficulty in breathing that you always in get- 

 ting up to your office use the lift instead of going up one 

 flight of stairs. This is very sad, and shows how mistaken 

 you were in not deciding early in the winter on going South. 



You must do better next time ; and to that end the best 

 plan will be for you to come over here and spend the 

 winter with me, either here or abroad. As you see by one 

 of the inclosed extracts, which has in one or other form 

 appeared in many of the newspapers, the public insist that 

 I shall go abroad somewhere. As they have failed in send- 

 ing me to Australia, they seem to mean that I shall go to 

 the Riviera, and not only that I shall go, but that I shall 

 live there permanently. The decision was quite news to 

 me; but nevertheless it jumps with my intention in so far 

 as that I had contemplated flying south next winter; for 

 though I do not suffer from our own winter in the ordinary 

 way, I suffer from it in the depressing effects of cold. 

 Perhaps Capri and Sicily and the south of Spain may be 

 the places; and if I go, you must come over and go with 

 me, as before. 



NEW YORK, June 13, 1884. 



MY DEAR SPENCER : . . . I thank you much and very 

 sincerely for your note after you had seen Mr. Appleton, 

 proposing that I come over for another winter with you in 

 the South. I am certainly in a very bad way, and it would 

 no doubt have been better had I gone somewhere South 

 the past winter. 



In fact my satchel was packed in February for such an 

 escape, when my sister broke her arm, and the case proved 

 so bad that I could not leave. I have, however, survived 



