Ever your loving Pater.

Don’t know M—­’s whereabouts.  But if she is with you, say I wrote her a long screed (Number 8) and posted it to-day—­with my love as a model husband and complete letter-writer.

[On returning home he found that the Linnean medal had been awarded him.]

4 Marlborough Place, May 18, 1890.

My dear Hooker,

How’s a’ wi’ you?  My boy and I came back from Madeira yesterday in great feather.  As for myself, riding about on mules, or horses, for six to ten hours at a stretch—­burning in sun or soaking in rain—­over the most entirely breakneck roads and tracks I have ever made acquaintance with, except perhaps in Morocco—­has proved a most excellent tonic, cathartic, and alterative all in one.  Existence of heart and stomach are matters of faith, not of knowledge, with me at present.  I hope it may last, and I have had such a sickener of invalidism that my intention is to keep severely out of all imprudences.

But what is a man to do if his friends take advantage of his absence, and go giving him gold medals behind his back?  That you have been an accomplice in this nefarious plot—­mine own familiar friend whom I trusted and trust—­is not to be denied.  Well, it is very pleasant to have toil that is now all ancient history remembered, and I shall go to the meeting and the dinner and make my speech in spite of as many possible devils of dyspepsia as there are plates and dishes on the table.

We were lucky in getting in for nothing worse than heavy rolling, either out or in.  Teneriffe is well worth seeing.  The Canadas is something quite by itself, a bit of Egypt 6000 feet up with a bare volcanic cone, or rather long barrow sticking up 6000 feet in the middle of it.

Otherwise, Madeira is vastly superior.  I rode across from Funchal to Sao Vicente, up to Paul da Serra, then along the coast to Santa Anna, and back from Santa Anna to Funchal.  I have seen nothing comparable except in Mauritius, nor anything anywhere like the road by the cliffs from Sao Vicente to Santa Anna.  Lucky for me that my ancient nautical habit of sticking on to a horse came back.  A good deal of the road is like a bad staircase, with no particular banisters, and a well of 1000 feet with the sea at the bottom.  Your heart would rejoice over the great heaths.  I saw one, the bole of which split into nearly equal trunks; and one of these was just a metre in circumference, and had a head as big as a moderate-sized ash.  Gorse in full flower, up to 12 or 15 feet high.  On the whole a singular absence of flowering herbs except Cinerarias and, especially in Teneriffe, Echium.  I did not chance to see a Euphorbia in Madeira, though I believe there are some.  In Teneriffe they are everywhere in queer shapes, and there was a thing that mimicked the commonest Euphorbia but had no milk, which I will ask you about when I see you.  The Euphorbias were all in flower, but this thing had none.  But you will have had enough of my scrawl.