Now don’t you in your own heart and soul quarrel with me for this long silence?  Not half so much as I quarrel with myself, I know; but if you could read half the letters I write to you in imagination, you would swear by me for the best of correspondents.  The truth is, that when I have done my morning’s work, down goes my pen, and from that minute I feel it a positive impossibility to take it up again, until imaginary butchers and bakers wave me to my desk.  I walk about brimful of letters, facetious descriptions, touching morsels, and pathetic friendships, but can’t for the soul of me uncork myself.  The post-office is my rock ahead.  My average number of letters that must be written every day is, at the least, a dozen.  And you could no more know what I was writing to you spiritually, from the perusal of the bodily thirteenth, than you could tell from my hat what was going on in my head, or could read my heart on the surface of my flannel waistcoat.

This is a little fishing-place; intensely quiet; built on a cliff whereon—­in the centre of a tiny semicircular bay—­our house stands; the sea rolling and dashing under the windows.  Seven miles out are the Goodwin Sands, (you’ve heard of the Goodwin Sands?) whence floating lights perpetually wink after dark, as if they were carrying on intrigues with the servants.  Also there is a big lighthouse called the North Foreland on a hill behind the village, a severe parsonic light, which reproves the young and giddy floaters, and stares grimly out upon the sea.  Under the cliff are rare good sands, where all the children assemble every morning and throw up impossible fortifications, which the sea throws down again at high water.  Old gentlemen and ancient ladies flirt after their own manner in two reading-rooms and on a great many scattered seats in the open air.  Other old gentlemen look all day through telescopes and never see anything.  In a bay-window in a one pair sits from nine o’clock to one a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins as if he thought he were very funny indeed.  His name is Boz.  At one he disappears, and presently emerges from a bathing-machine, and may be seen—­a kind of salmon-colored porpoise—­splashing about in the ocean.  After that he may be seen in another bay-window on the ground-floor, eating a strong lunch; after that, walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his back in the sand reading a book.  Nobody bothers him unless they know he is disposed to be talked to; and I am told he is very comfortable indeed.  He’s as brown as a berry, and they do say is a small fortune to the innkeeper who sells beer and cold punch.  But this is mere rumor.  Sometimes he goes up to London (eighty miles, or so, away), and then I’m told there is a sound in Lincoln Inn Fields at night, as of men laughing, together with a clinking of knives and forks and wine-glasses.

I never shall have been so near you