From this village to the next is only three Petersburg versts (fifteen hundred arshins, a quick walk): but your little apple-house where I want so badly to visit you — regularly, regularly! — is fifty or sixty whole seventeenth-century versts away! If we compose the village in our hearts it will not hurt us so much that we are not homesteading in it. If I take a well-weighted little machete — one of those ones they sell at the ferretería by parque Morazán, the blade not more than fifty or sixty barleycorns long — and I whack & thwack a while on a split-out piece of heartwood pruned off your big old Collins tree, the one behind the outhouse, and Lou loans me her crooked-knife, I could work up a good set of spoons for us all to use with the star-&-heart guacales for our birthday soup Sunday.