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I will not be so unjust to the kindness which I have received from you and some others as to say that when I lost my father I lost the only friend I could have, but I most undoubtedly lost the best, and being to-day where that happened, and more at leisure to recollect it, je la sens, cette perte, avec la meme vivacite aujourd'hui, que je ne l'eusse faite que depuis trots jours.
I had received orders to make a flight during a snow-storm. I rose to the prescribed height and then prepared to make my descent. A whirling squall caught me in the act of making a spiral. I felt the tail of my machine go down and the nose point up. I had a classical perte de vitesse.
The loss of the latter, I must own, I feel much the more sensibly of the two; serrer les files, comme Von dit a Varnee, n'est pas assez; la perte ne laissera pas de reparoitre, in that I had counted upon a resource in the one more than in the other. Meynell, and Sir J. Seabright, an excellent dinner. We were at a private ball at night, and this morning early I set out for London.
Our first sketching excursion was to the Perte du Rhone, and, while Ruskin was drawing some mountain forms beyond the river, he asked me to draw some huts near by, not picturesque cottages, thatched roofs and lichen-stained walls, but shanties, such as the Irish laborers on our railways build by the roadside, of deal boards on end, irregular and careless without being picturesque, and too closely associated with pigsty construction, in my mind, to be worth drawing.
'Mais il n'y a pas de petite perte qui revient souvent': and all these accidents put together make a considerable sum total. I have found so little good by these waters, that I do not intend to stay here above a week longer; and then remove my crazy body to London, which is the most convenient place either to live or die in.
This is the exit of the Lesse, which, higher up the vale, at the curious Perte de Lesse, swerves suddenly from its obvious course, down the bright and cheerful valley, to plunge noisily through a narrow slit in the rock "Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea."
American promiscuity, goodness knew, had been strange to him, but it was nothing to the queerness of American criticism. This lady would discourse to him a perte de vue on differences where he only saw resemblances, and both the merits and the defects of a good many members of Washington society, as this society was interpreted to him by Mrs. Bonnycastle, he was often at a loss to understand.
Just as they shook hands at parting, the good old general, with a smile, said to him, 'I believe I had better not stir in the matter of Benson's commission till I hear more from you. My harangue, in favour of the military profession, will, I fancy, prove like most other harangues, EN PURE PERTE.
A general easy civility and attention to the common run of ugly women, and of middling men, both which I sillily thought, called, and treated, as odd people, would have made me as many friends, as by the contrary conduct I made myself enemies. All this too was 'a pure perte'; for I might equally, and even more successfully, have made my court, when I had particular views to gratify.
It is perhaps a tribute to the growing perfection of the airplanes that in certain moments of peril the machine is best left wholly to itself. Its stability is such that if freed from control it will often right itself and glide safely to earth. This not infrequently occurs in the moment of the dreaded perte de vitesse, to which reference has been made.
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