1st October, 188– Hotel du Lys, Bruges. After all, few places appeal to my imagination more potently than this autumnal old city–the most mediaeval town in Europe. I am glad that I have come back here at last. It is melancholy indeed, but then at my age one’s pleasures are chiefly melancholy. One is essentially […]

I It was in Brittany, and the apples were already acquiring a ruddier, autumnal tint, amid their greens and yellows, though Autumn was not yet; and the country lay very still and fair in the sunset which had befallen, softly and suddenly as is the fashion there. A man and a girl stood looking down […]

I At my dining-place in old Soho–I call it mine because there was a time when I became somewhat inveterate there, keeping my napkin (changed once a week) in a ring recognisable by myself and the waiter, my bottle of Beaune (replenished more frequently), and my accustomed seat–at this restaurant of mine, with its confusion […]

Eheu fugaces! How that air carries me back, that air ground away so unmercifully, sans tune, sans time on a hopelessly discordant barrel-organ, right underneath my window. It is being bitterly execrated, I know, by the literary gentleman who lives in chambers above me, and by the convivial gentleman who has a dinner party underneath. […]

During five years of an almost daily association with Michael Garth, in a solitude of Chili, which threw us, men of common speech, though scarcely of common interests, largely on each other’s tolerance, I had grown, if not into an intimacy with him, at least into a certain familiarity, through which the salient feature of […]