There is, then, in your novel a remarkable description of a noonday woodland scene somewhere on your enchanted Kentucky uplands--a cool, moist forest spot. Into this scene you introduced some rare, beautiful Kentucky ferns. I can _see_ the ferns! I can see the sunlight striking through the waving treetops down upon them! Now, as it happens, in the old garden under my windows, loving the shade and moisture of its trees and its wall, I have a bank of ferns. They are a marvelous company, in their way as good as Wordsworth's flock of daffodils; for they have been collected out of England's best and from other countries. Here, then, is literally the root of this letter: Will you send me the root-stocks of some of those Kentucky ferns to grow and wave on my Warwickshire fern bank? Do not suppose that my garden is on a small scale a public park or exhibition, made as we have created Kensington Gardens. Everything in it is, on the contrary, enriched with some personal association. I began it when a young man in the following way: At that period I was much under the influence of the Barbizon painters, and I sometimes entertained myself in the forests where masters of that school had worked by hunting up what I supposed were the scenes of some of Corot's masterpieces. Corot, if my eyes tell me the truth, painted trees as though he were looking at enormous ferns. His ferns spring out of the soil and some rise higher than others as trees; his trees descend through the air and are lost lower down as ferns. One day I dug up some Corot ferns for my good Warwickshire loam. Another winter Christine Nilsson was singing at Covent Garden. I spent several evenings with her. When I bade her good-bye, I asked her to send me some ferns from Norway in memory of Balzac and _Seraphita_. Yet another winter, being still a young man and he, alas! a much older one, I passed an evening in Paris with Turgenieff. I would persist in talking about his novels and I remember quoting these lines from one of them: "It was a splendid clear morning; tiny mottled cloudlets hung like snipe in the clear pale azure; a fine dew was sprinkled on the leaves and grass and glistened like silver on the spiders' webs; the moist dark earth seemed still to retain the rosy traces of the dawn; the songs of larks showered down from all over the sky." He sat looking at me in surprised, touched silence.