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20 White Rock Place My dear Nicholson, . . . . . I am strangely thrown back anew into sympathy with your studies. I have been working really hard at Arabic for some time—and why, do you think? Because I had the temerity to undertake (for philological reasons) to teach a friend modern Arabic. I could not have been so rash or so foolish as to undertake to teach ancient Arabic; yet I am almost driven on learning the ancient by the number of questions which have kept arising. . . . I have been looking up all my old MSS., and am surprised at the extent of my former attainments, very much indeed of which I had forgotten. But words come back to me with a pleasant rapidity, and I am delighted to find how much I have exaggerated to myself the gap between old and new Arabic.
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