It is early to be in bed, but I’m always abed before 9, on this voyage; and up at 7 or a trifle later, every morning.  If I ever take such a trip again, I will have myself called at the first tinge of dawn and get to sea as soon after as possible.  The early dawn on the water-nothing can be finer, as I know by old Mississippi experience.  I did so long for you and Sue yesterday morning—­the most superb sunrise!—­the most marvelous sunrise! and I saw it all from the very faintest suspicion of the coming dawn all the way through to the final explosion of glory.  But it had interest private to itself and not to be found elsewhere in the world; for between me and it, in the far distant-eastward, was a silhouette mountain-range in which I had discovered, the previous afternoon, a most noble face upturned to the sky, and mighty form out stretched, which I had named Napoleon Dreaming of Universal Empire—­and now, this prodigious face, soft, rich, blue, spirituelle, asleep, tranquil, reposeful, lay against that giant conflagration of ruddy and golden splendors all rayed like a wheel with the upstreaming and far-reaching lances of the sun.  It made one want to cry for delight, it was so supreme in its unimaginable majesty and beauty.

We had a curious experience today.  A little after I had sealed and directed my letter to you, in which I said we should make Avignon before 4, we got lost.  We ceased to encounter any village or ruin mentioned in our “particularizes” and detailed Guide of the Rhone—­went drifting along by the hour in a wholly unknown land and on an uncharted river!  Confound it, we stopped talking and did nothing but stand up in the boat and search the horizons with the glass and wonder what in the devil had happened.  And at last, away yonder at 5 o’clock when some east towers and fortresses hove in sight we couldn’t recognize them for Avignon—­yet we knew by the broken bridge that it was Avignon.

Then we saw what the trouble was—­at some time or other we had drifted down the wrong side of an island and followed a sluggish branch of the Rhone not frequented in modern times.  We lost an hour and a half by it and missed one of the most picturesque and gigantic and history-sodden masses of castellated medieval ruin that Europe can show.

It was dark by the time we had wandered through the town and got the letters and found the hotel—­so I went to bed.

We shall leave here at noon tomorrow and float down to Arles, arriving about dark, and there bid good bye to the boat, the river-trip finished.  Between Arles and Nimes (and Avignon again,) we shall be till Saturday morning—­then rail it through on that day to Ouchy, reaching the hotel at 11 at night if the train isn’t late.

Next day (Sunday) if you like, go to Basel, and Monday to Berlin.  But I shall be at your disposal, to do exactly as you desire and prefer.

          With no end of love to all of you and twice as much to you,
               sweetheart,
                         Saml.