Clyst S. George. April 30, 1880.

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We have had rather a chaff with Mr. Ellacombe (who in his ninety-first year is as keen a gardener as ever!) because he has many strange sorts of Fritillary, and when I told him I had seen and gone wild over a sole-coloured pale yellow one which I saw exhibited in the Horticultural Gardens, he simply put me down—­“No, my dear, there’s no such thing; there’s a white Fritillary I can show you outside, and there’s Fritillaria Lutea which is yellow and spotted, but there’s no such plant as you describe.”  Still it evidently made him restless, and he kept relating anecdotes of how people are always sending him shaves about flowers.  “I’d a letter the other day, my dear, to describe a white Crown Imperial—­a thing that has never been!” Later he announced—­“I have written to Barr and Sugden—­’Gentlemen!  Here’s another White Elephant.  A lady has seen a sole-coloured Yellow Fritillary!’”

This morning B. and S. wrote back, and are obliged to confess that “a yellow Fritillary has been produced,” but (not being the producers) they add, “It is not a good yellow.” Pour moi, I take leave to judge of colours as well as Barr and Sugden, and can assure you it is a very lovely yellow, pale and chrome-y.  It has been like a chapter out of Alphonse Karr!

One of the horticultural papers is just about to publish Mr. Ellacombe’s old list of the things he has grown in his own garden.  Three thousand species!

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I hope you liked that Daily Telegraph article on the Back Gardener I sent you?  It is really fine workmanship in the writing line as well as being amusing.  I abuse the Press often enough, but I will say such Essays (for they well deserve the name) are a great credit to the age—­in Penny Dailies!!!

“The Nursery Nonsense of the Birds,” “A Stratified Chronology of Occupancies,” “Waves of Whims,” etc., etc., are the work of a man who can use his tools with a master’s hand, or at least a skilled worker’s!

I am reading another French novel, by Daudet, Jack.  So far (as I have got) it is marvellous writing.  “Le petit Roi—­Dahomey” in the school “des pays chauds” is a Dickenesque character, but quite marvellous—­his fate—­his “gri-gri”—­his final Departure to the land where all things are so “made new” that “the former” do not “come into mind”—­having in that supreme hour forgotten alike his sufferings, his tormentors, and his friends—­and only babbling in Dahomeian in that last dream in which his spirit returned to its first earthly home before “going home” for Good!—­is superb!!!  The possible meanness and brutality of civilized man in Paris—­the possible grandeur and obvious immortality of the smallest, youngest, “gri-gri” worshipping nigger of Dahomey oh it is wonderful altogether, and I should fancy SUCH a sketch of the incompris poet and the rest of the clique!! “C’est LUI.”