The mail of yesterday which brought you Mr. Blackthorne's reply to your arraignment brought me also a letter: he must have written to us both instantly. His letter is the only one that I cannot send you; you would not desire to read it. You are too big and generous, too warmly human, too exuberantly vital, to care to lend ear to a great man's chagrin and regret for an impulsive mistake. You are not Cassius to carp at Caesar. Now this afternoon a second letter comes from Mr. Blackthorne and that I enclose: it will do you good to read it--it is not a black passing cloud, it is steady human sunlight. BEVERLEY. [Enclosed letter from Edward Blackthorne] MY DEAR MR. SANDS: I follow up my letter of yesterday with the unexpected tidings of to-day. I am willing to believe that these will interest you as associated with your coming visit. Hodge is dead. His last birthday, his final natal eclipse, has bowled him over and left him darkened for good. He can trouble us no more, but will now do his part as mould for the rose of York and the rose of Lancaster. He will help to make a mound for some other Englishman's ferns. When you come--and I know you will come--we shall drink a cup of tea in the garden to his peaceful memory--and to his troubled memory for Latin. I am now waiting for you. Come, out of your younger world and with your youth to an older world and to an older man. And let each of us find in our meeting some presage of an alliance which ought to grow always closer in the literatures of the two nations. Their literatures hold their ideals; and if their ideals touch and mingle, then nothing practical can long keep them far apart. If two oak trees reach one another with their branches, they must meet in their roots; for the branches are aerial roots and the roots are underground branches. Come. In the eagerness of my letter of yesterday to put myself not in the right but less, if possible, in the wrong, I forgot the very matter with which the right and the wrong originated. _Will you, after all, send the ferns?_ The whole garden waits for them; a white light falls on the vacant spot; a white light falls on your books in my library; a white light falls on you, I wait for you, both hands outstretched. EDWARD BLACKTHORNE. (Note penciled on the margin of the letter by Beverley Sands to Ben Doolittle: "You will see that I am back where the whole thing started; I have to begin all over again with the ferns. And now the florists will be after me again. I feel this in the trembling marrow of my bones, and my bones by this time are a wireless station on this subject.") BEVERLEY. JUDD & JUDD TO BEVERLEY SANDS DEAR SIR: We take pleasure in enclosing our new catalogue for the coming autumn, and should be pleased to receive any further commissions for the European trade. We repeat that we have no connection whatever with any house doing business in the city under the name of Botany.