Sardonic spiders
have sewed up the key-holes. All is silence and dust and
desolation. --I interrupt this a moment, to take a shy at Watkins
with the second volume of Cesar Birotteau. Missed him! I think I
could bring him down with a copy of Sainte-Beuve or the
Dictionnaire Universel, if I had it. These small Balzac books
somehow do not quite fit my hand; but I shall fetch him yet. I've
an idea that Watkins is tapping the old gentleman's Chateau Yquem.
Duplicate key of the wine-cellar. Hibernian swarries in the front
basement. Young Cheops up stairs, snug in his cerements. Watkins
glides into my chamber, with that colorless, hypocritical face of
his drawn out long like an accordion; but I know he grins all the
way down stairs, and is glad I have broken my leg. Was not my evil
star in the very zenith when I ran up to town to attend that dinner
at Delmonico's? I didn't come up altogether for that. It was partly
to buy Frank Livingstone's roan mare Margot. And now I shall not be
able to sit in the saddle these two months. I'll send the mare down
to you at The Pines--is that the name of the place?
Old Dillon fancies that I have something on my mind. He drives me
wild with lemons. Lemons for a mind diseased! Nonsense. I am only
as restless as the devil under this confinement--a thing I'm not
used to. Take a man who has never had so much as a headache or a
toothache in his life, strap one of his legs in a section of water-
spout, keep him in a room in the city for weeks, with the hot
weather turned on, and then expect him to smile and purr and be
happy! It is preposterous.
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