Thank Heaven we are settled down again and I can vibrate between my beloved books and even more beloved saxifrages. The additions to the house are great improvements every way, outside and in, and when the conservatory is finished we shall be quite palatial; but, alas, of all my box-trees only one remains green, that is the "amari," or more properly "fusci" aliquid. [Sad things will happen, however. Although the local florists vowed that the box-trees would not stand the winds of Eastbourne, he was set on seeing if he could not get them to grow despite the gardeners, whom he had once or twice found false prophets. But this time they were right. Vain were watering and mulching and all the arts of the husbandman. The trees turned browner and browner every day, and the little avenue from terrace to terrace had to be ignominiously uprooted and removed. A sad blow this, worse even than the following:--] A lovely clematis in full flower, which I had spent hours in nailing up, has just died suddenly. I am more inconsolable than Jonah! [He answers some gardening chaff of Sir Michael Foster's:--] Wait till I cut you out at the Horticultural. I have not made up my mind what to compete in yet. Look out when I do! [And when the latter offered to propose him for that Society, he replied:--] Proud an' 'appy should I be to belong to the Horticultural if you will see to it. Could send specimens of nailing up creepers if qualification is required. [After his long battlings for his early loves of science and liberty of thought, his later love of the tranquil garden seemed in harmony with the dignified rest from struggle. To those who thought of the past and the present, there was something touching in the sight of the old man whose unquenched fires now lent a gentler glow to the peaceful retirement he had at length won for himself. His latter days were fruitful and happy in their unflagging intellectual interests, set off by the new delights of the succidia altera, that second resource of hale old age for many a century. All through his last and prolonged illness, from earliest spring until midsummer, he loved to hear how the garden was getting on, and would ask after certain flowers and plants. When the bitter cold spring was over and the warm weather came, he spent most of the day outside, and even recovered so far as to be able to walk once into the lower garden and visit his favourite flowers. These children of his old age helped to cheer him to the last. *** APPENDIX 1. As for this unfinished work, suggestive outlines left for others to fill in, Professor Howes writes to me in October 1899:--