“We made this port—­Genoa—­last night.  All day we have been discharging cargo.  Half my crew has gone ashore, set on liquoring and wenching after the manner of unregenerate sailor-men all the world over.  The other half follows their bad example to-morrow, as we shall be lying idle in honour of the Christmas festival.  On board discipline is as strict as I know how to make it, but ashore my hand is lifted off them.  So long as they turn up on time they are free to follow their fancy, even though it lead them to smutty places.  My own fancies don’t happen to lie that way, for which I in nowise praise myself.  It is an affair of absence of inclination rather than overmuch active virtue.  I am really no better than they, seeing I yield to the only temptation which takes me—­the temptation to write to you.  I have resisted it times out of number since I bade you good-bye at The Hard.  But Christmas-night turns one a bit soft and craving for sight and touch of those who belong to one.  So much I dare say, though I go back on nothing I said to you then about the keeping up of decent barriers.  Only being Christmas-night-soft I give myself the licence of a holiday—­for once.  The night is clear as glass and the city rises in a great semicircle, pierced by and outlined in twinkling lights, right up to the ring of forts crowning the hills, where the sky begins—­a sky smothered in stars.  I have been out, on deck, looking at it all, at the black masts and funnels of the ships ranging to right and left against the glare of the town, and at the oily, black water, thick with floating filth and garbage and with wandering reflections like jewels and precious metals on the surface of it—­the rummiest mixture of fair and foul.  And then, all that faded out somehow—­and I saw black water again, but clean this time and with no reflections, under a close-drawn veil of falling rain; and I felt to lift you out of the boat and carry you in across the lawn and up to your room.  And then I could not hold out against temptation any longer, but came here into my cabin and sat down to write to you.  The picture of you, wet and limp and helpless in my arms, is always with me, stamped on the very substance of my brain, as is the other picture of you in the drawing-room lined with book-cases, where we found one another for the second time.  Found one another in spirit, I mean; an almost terribly greater finding than the first one, because it can go on for ever as it belongs to the part of us which does not die.  That is my faith anyhow.  To-morrow morning I will go ashore and into one of those big, tawdry Genoa churches, and listen to the music, standing in some quiet corner, and think about you and renew my vows to you.  It won’t be half bad to keep Christmas that way.