I've been made so miserable by a paper of Sir J. Lubbock's on flowers and insects, that I must come and whine to you. He says, and really as if he knew it, that insects, chiefly bees, entirely originate flowers; that all scent, color, pretty form, is owing to bees; that flowers which insects don't take care of, have no scent, color, nor honey.
It seems to me, that it is likelier that the flowers which have no scent, color, nor honey, don't get any attention from the bees.
But the man really knows so much about it, and has tried so many pretty experiments, that he makes me miserable.
So I'm afraid you're miserable too. Write to tell me about it all.
It is very lovely of you to send me so sweet a note when I have not been near you since the tenth century. But it is all I can do to get my men and my moor looked after; they have both the instinct of doing what I don't want, the moment my back's turned; and then there has not been light enough to know a hawk from a hand-saw, or a crow from a ptarmigan, or a moor from a meadow. But how much better your eyes must be when you can write such lovely notes!
I don't understand how the strange cat came to love you so quickly, after one dinner and a rest by the fire! I should have thought an ill-treated and outcast animal would have regarded everything as a trap, for a month at least,—dined in tremors, warmed itself with its back to the fire, watching the door, and jumped up the chimney if you stepped on the rug.
If you only knew the good your peacock's feathers have done me, and if you could only see the clever drawing I'm making of one from the blue breast! You know what lovely little fern or equisetum stalks of sapphire the filaments are; they beat me so, but they're coming nice.