and he would work in the garden for me in return.  I told him I’d teach him without that, but he said he ‘liked things square and fair,’ and Mr. Wood said I was to let him; so he comes up after work-hours one night and I teach him, and then he comes up the next evening and works in the garden.  It’s very jolly, because now I can plot things out my own way, and do them without hurting my back.  I’m going to clear all the old rose-bushes out of the shady border.  The trees are so big now, it’s so shady that the roses never come to anything but blight, and I mean to make a fernery there instead.  Bob says there’s a little wood belonging to Lord Beckwith that the trustees have cut down completely, and it’s going to be ploughed up.  They’re stubbing up the stumps now, and we can have as many as we like for the carting away.  Nothing makes such good ferneries, you get so many crannies and corners.  Bob says it’s not far from the canal, and he thinks he could borrow a hand-cart from the man that keeps the post-office up there, and get a load or two down to the canal-bank, and then fetch them down to our place in the Adela.  Oh, how I wish you were here to help!  Jem’s going to.  He’s awfully kind to me now you’re gone.  Talking of the Adela if you are very long away (and some voyages last two or three years), I think I shall finish the garden, and the croft and the orchard, or at any rate one journey round them; and I think for another of your voyages I will do the log of the Adela on the canal, for with water-plants, and shells, and larvae, and beasts that live in the banks, it would be splendid.  Do you know, one might give a whole book up easily to a list of nothing but willows and osiers, and the different kinds of birds and insects that live in them.  But the number of kinds there are of some things is quite wonderful.  What do you think of more than a hundred species of iris, and I’ve only got five in the garden, but one of them is white.  I don’t suppose you’ll have much time to collect things, but I keep hoping that some day, if I live, you’ll command a ship of your own, and take me with you, as they do take scientific men some voyages.  I hope I shall live.  I don’t think I get any worse.  Cripples do sometimes live a long time.  I asked Dr. Brown if he believed any cripple had ever lived to be a hundred, and he said he didn’t know of one, nor yet ninety, nor eighty, for I asked him.  But he’s sure cripples have lived to be seventy.  If I do, I’ve got fifty-four years yet.  That sounds pretty well, but it soon goes, if one has a lot to do.  Mr. Wood doesn’t think it likely you could command a vessel for twenty years at least.  That only leaves thirty-four for scientific research, and all the arranging at home besides.  I’ve given up one of my books to plotting this out in the rough, and I see that there’s plenty of English work for twenty years, even if I could count on all my time, which (that’s the worst of having a bad back and head!) I can’t.  There’s