To A. W. Verrall.
C/o Leacock & Co.
Funchal,
Madeira.
15 Jan. 1905.
It is good to see your hand and kind of you to write to me, especially as I fear that writing is not so easy to you as it once was. I do very earnestly hope that things go fairly well with you and that you have not much pain. Yesterday I was thinking a lot of your courage and my cowardice for I took an off day—off from the biography I mean—and attained an altitude of (say) 5250 feet (a cog-wheel railway saving me 2000 thereof, however) and I was bounding about up there like a kid of the goats—and very base I thought myself not to be lecturing. There is not much left of me avoirdupoisly speaking; but that little bounds along when it has had a good sunning; and to-day I have a rubbed heel and a permanent thirst as in the good old days. Missing a train on said railway I made the last part of the descent in the special Madeira fashion on a sledge glissading down over polished cobble stone pavement—a youth running behind to hold the thing back by a rope: it gives the unaccustomed a pretty little squirm at starting. Up in the hills it is a pleasant world—you pass through many different zones of vegetation very rapidly—at one moment all is laurel and heath—you cross a well-marked line and all is tilling—then you are out among dead bracken on an open hill-top that might be English. Get on a sledge and wiss (or is it wiz?) you go down to the sugar and bananas through bignonia and bougainvillia which blind you by their ferocity.