Ever your loving father,
T.H. Huxley.
Hotel Victoria, Via dei due Macelli, January 16, 1885.
My dear Foster,
It seems to me that I am giving my friends a world of trouble…
I have had a bad week of it, and the night before last was under the impression that I was about to succumb shortly to a complication of maladies, and moreover, that a wooden box that my wife had just had made would cost thousands of pounds in the way of payment for extra luggage before we reached home. I do not know which hypochondriacal possession was the most depressing. I can laugh at it now, but I really was extraordinarily weak and ill.
We had made up our minds to bolt from Rome to Florence at once, when I suddenly got better, and to-day am all right. So as we hear of snow at Florence we shall stop where we are. It has been raining cats and dogs here, and the Tiber rose 40 feet and inundated the low grounds. But "cantabit elevatus"; it can't touch us, and at any rate the streets are washed clean.
The climate is mild here. We have a capital room and all the sunshine that is to be had, plus a good fire when needful, and at worst one can always get a breezy walk on the Pincio hard by.
However, about the leave. Am I to do anything or nothing? I am dying to get back to steady occupation and English food, and the sort of regimen one can maintain in one's own house. On the other hand, I stand in fear of the bitter cold of February and early March, and still more of the thousand and one worries of London outside one's work. So I suppose it will be better if I keep away till Easter, or at any rate to the end of March. But I must hear something definite from the Home Office. I have written to Donnelly to the same effect. My poor Marian's relapse did not do us any good, for all that I expected it. However the last accounts are very favourable.
I wrote to Evans the other day about a re-arrangement of the duties of the Secretary and Assistant Secretary. I thought it was better to write to him than to you on that subject, and I begged him to discuss the matter with the officers. It is quite absurd that Stokes and you should waste your time in press drudgery.