So here I am, the first hour after release, sitting on the porch of a villa, looking across a valley at amethyst mountains, crowned with a sprinkling of blue and white snow.  The noises that come to me are not raucous;—­the twitter of birds, a rooster crowing, a well-pump throbbing its heart out, the shouts of some children at play, a distant school bell, with no silver in its alloy, however, the swish of a wood-sawing machine in some back-yard.  So my ears are not lonesome.  Immediately before me is the gray-lavender bole of a tall eucalyptus, not a leaf or branch for fifty feet, and then a drooping cascade of blue-green feathers.  Beyond it a few feet a red-blue eucalyptus, sturdy, branching almost at the ground and in blossom.  These stand near the border of a drive which is marked by a cypress hedge, trimmed and proper, and beyond the drive, on the front of the terrace are magnolia and iron-wood and avocado and palm and spruce, rising up out of beds of carnations and geraniums, jasmine and pansies (all violet), and cherokee roses, five-petaled, white with golden centers, and rose colored—­ (the wild rose with a university education, a year or two in Italy, and the care of a good maid).  While beyond this terrace are orange, and tangerine, and lemon, and grapefruit with their green, yellow, and deep red-golden fruit pendant; and still further on, a fringe of blossoming pear trees tell you that this is not the tropics after all.  The breeze is a gentle woman’s hand, a soft touch, kindly, tender, emotional, but not disturbing.  It is not lotus-eating time.  I don’t know that that time ever comes here.  Autos whisk through the woods, buildings are going up, the air is dry and has tang; it has challenge in it, but it does not give off the heady champagne of the air that the snow breathes out on your Millbrook hillside.

I remember as I looked from my window at the sunset at Bethel saying to myself, “Can there be any fairer spot than this?” And this morning as I saw the sun rise into the pink and blue of the sky, empurpling the shadowed hills and splashing rose leaves on the snowy mountains, I again said “Is there anything lovelier, anywhere?” Great blessing, these catholic eyes!  Should the heart be equally catholic?  There is a real problem in philosophy and sociology for you!

And now that you know how happily circumstanced I am as to environment your doctorial demand is for something as to the behavior of the organs and nerves which we call the physical man.  Well, I can’t tell you much.  I do not rise and walk half a block without that trigger being pulled, but the explosion is not dynamite, rather poor black powder, I should say.  If I walk half a dozen blocks I stop a half a dozen times, and once or twice nibble at a precious pellet of nitro.  At night I am wakened as of yore, but the agonizing, crushing pains do not come every night. ...  I eat prunes and bran biscuit and coffee for breakfast; a bit of cooked fruit (and that