The floor shakes under my belly for a minute and a half as the Odessa train hauls itself past our house. I'm on the parquet most of the morning, my torso propped up on its elbows to effect a slight back-bend (countering the ache resultant of too far a walk on pavements last night with heavy bag of new books & no arch-supports) and to free up my hands for the sketch-work spread out on the floor before me. Sketching the several interesting varieties of flowering shrub that hang so insistently, so independently, so immediately in the dense silver-washed air of the world captured by the collection of Crimean War photographs my brother brought home for me from Jassy. I'll show my sketches to Pavel Durgeyevich who is sure to be able to identify them.