[It was strange that this interest should have come suddenly at the end of his life. Though he had won the prize in Lindley's botanical class, he had never been a field botanist till he was attracted by the Swiss gentians. As has been said before, his love of nature had never run to collecting either plants or animals. Mere "spider-hunters and hay-naturalists," as a German friend called them, he was inclined to regard as the camp-followers of science. It was the engineering side of nature, the unity of plan of animal construction, worked out in infinitely varying detail, which engrossed him. Walking once with Hooker in the Rhone valley, where the grass was alive with red and green grasshoppers, he said,] "I would give anything to be as interested in them as you are." [But this feeling, unknown to him before, broke out in his gentian work. He told Hooker, "I can't express the delight I have in them." It continued undiminished when once he settled in the new house and laid out a garden. His especial love was for the rockery of Alpines, many of which came from Sir J. Hooker. Here, then, he threw himself into gardening with characteristic ardour. He described his position as a kind of mean between the science of the botanist and the empiricism of the working gardener. He had plenty to suggest, but his gardener, like so many of his tribe, had a rooted mistrust of any gardening lore culled from books. "Books? They'll say anything in them books." And he shared, moreover, that common superstition, perhaps really based upon a question of labour, that watering of flowers, unnecessary in wet weather, is actively bad in dry. So my father's chief occupation in the garden was to march about with a long hose, watering, and watering especially his alpines in the upper garden and along the terraces lying below the house. The saxifrages and the creepers on the house were his favourite plants. When he was not watering the one he would be nailing up the other, for the winds of Eastbourne are remarkably boisterous, and shrivel up what they do not blow down.] "I believe I shall take to gardening," [he writes, a few months after entering the new house,] "if I live long enough. I have got so far as to take a lively interest in the condition of my shrubs, which have been awfully treated by the long cold." [From this time his letters contain many references to his garden. He is astonished when his gardener asks leave to exhibit at the local show, but delighted with his pluck. Hooker jestingly sends him a plant "which will flourish on any dry, neglected bit of wall, so I think it will just suit you."] Great improvements have been going on (he writes in 1892), and the next time you come you shall walk in the "avenue" of four box-trees. Only five are to be had for love or money at present, but there are hopes of a sixth, and then the "avenue" will be full ten yards long! Figurez vous ca! [It was of this he wrote on October 1:--]