When the
thirty-three ...
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Those words: 'when the thirty-three' were written by me over seventeen
years since--long years--seventeen in number, nor have I now any idea to
what they refer. The book in which I wrote I had lost in the cabin of
the _Speranza_, and yesterday, returning to Imbros from an hour's
aimless cruise, discovered it there behind a chest.
I find now considerable difficulty in guiding the pencil, and these few
lines now written have quite an odd look, like the handwriting of a man
not very proficient in the art: it is seventeen years, seventeen,
seventeen ... ah! And the expression of my ideas is not fluent either: I
have to think for the word a minute, and I should not be surprised if
the spelling of some of them is queer. My brain has been thinking
inarticulately perhaps, all these years: and the English words and
letters, as they now stand written, have rather an improbable and
foreign air to me, as a Greek or Russian book might look to a man who
has not so long been learning those languages as to forget the
impossibly foreign impression received from them on the first day of
tackling them.
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