"Last night I took my first lesson in whist-playing. I learned in one
evening to know the king, queen, and jack apart, and to understand what
my partner meant when she winked at me.
"The worst of this condition of things is that we shall bear the marks
of it all our lives. We are now sixteen daily papers behind the rest of
the world, and in those sixteen papers are items known to all the people
in all the cities, which will never be known to us. How prices have
fluctuated in that time we shall not know--what houses have burned down,
what robberies have been committed. When the papers do come, each of us
will rush for the latest dates; the news of two weeks ago is now
history, and no one reads history, especially the history of one's own
country.
"I bought a copy of 'Aurora Leigh' just before the freezing up, and I
have been careful, as it is the only copy on the island, to circulate it
freely. It must have been a pleasant visitor in the four or five
households which it has entered. We have had Dr. Kane's book and now
have the 'Japan Expedition.'
"The intellectual suffering will, I think, be all. I have no fear of
scarcity of provisions or fuel. There are old houses enough to burn.
Fresh meat is rather scarce because the English steamer required so much
victualling. We have a barrel of pork and a barrel of flour in the
house, and father has chickens enough to keep us a good while.
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