"Your suggestion"--that he should write a year-book of Nature--"of a diary out of doors would no doubt make a good book, and I shall give serious thought to it. My great difficulty is the physical difficulty of writing. Since the spine gave way, there is no position in which I can lie or sit so as to use a pen without distress. Even a short letter like this is painful. Consequently, a vast mass of ideas go into space, for I cannot write them down." In August he returns to the subject: "Many thanks for your kind letter and interest in my weakness. I sometimes rather need moral support of this sort, for after so long the spirits show signs of flagging, and the way seems endless. Such sympathy, therefore, helps me very much.... I should have liked to have written the book you proposed. I made several attempts, but it never satisfied me. I am glad, at all events, that you have forgiven my unintentional nonfulfilment of the promise. Even yet, perhaps, I may do something in that direction. Professor Gamgee, under whom I have been lately, says that complete recovery would follow a few weeks' basking in South Africa, or, failing that, Southern Europe. There is plenty of energy in me still. I sometimes dream of using the rifle--a dream, indeed, to a man who can with difficulty drag himself across a field." In June he writes to his friend, Mr. C.P. Scott, of the _Manchester Guardian_: "Since I last wrote to you I have been very seriously ill. The starvation went on and on, and no one could relieve it, till I had to stay in the bedroom, and finally went to bed, fainting nearly all day and night, and yet craving for food, half delirious, and in the most dreadful state. How I endured I cannot tell. At last I had Dr. Kidd down from London, and in forty-eight hours his treatment checked the disease. I got downstairs, next, out of doors in a Bath-chair, and now I can walk two hundred yards. But I am still the veriest shadow of a man--my nerves are gone to pieces--and he warns me that it will take months to effect a cure. Of that, however, he is certain. Under his advice I have left Eltham, and am staying here (Rotherfield, Sussex) till a cottage can be found for me near Tunbridge Wells.... My last piece of MS. appears in _Longman_ this month, and I have now no more left, having exhausted all I wrote when able. At least, there remains but one piece--'Nature in the Louvre.' It is about a beautiful statue that interested me greatly, and which seems to have escaped notice in England. I think you would like the ideas expressed in it."