of the estate, because he’s rich, of course; but do you know, I think he’s sadder than ever.  He’s very much cut up that the Colonel died, of course, but he seems desperate about everything, and talks more about suicide than he did at Snuffy’s, Jem says.  One thing he is quite changed about; he’s so clean! and quite a dandy.  He looked awfully handsome, and Jenny said he was beautifully dressed.  She says his pocket-handkerchief and his tie matched, and that his clothes fitted him so splendidly, though they were rough.  Well, he’s got a straight back, Jack; like you!  It’s hard he can’t be happy.  But I’m so sorry for him.  He went on dreadfully because you’d gone, and said that was just his luck, and then he wished to Heaven he were with you, and said you were a lucky dog, to be leading a devil-me-care life in the open air, with nothing to bother you.  He didn’t tell me what he’d got to bother him.  Lots of things, he said.  And he said life was a wretched affair, all round, and the only comfort was none of his family lived to be old.

“Wednesday. I had to stop on Monday, my head and back were so bad, and all yesterday too.  Dr. Brown came to see me, and talked a lot about you.  I am better to-day.  I think I had rather wound up my head with note-books.  You know I do like having lists of everything, and my sisters have been very good.  They got a lot of ruled paper very cheap, and have made me no end of books with brown-paper backs, and Dr. Brown has given me a packet of bottle labels.  You’ve only got to lick them and stick them on, and write the titles.  He gave me some before, you remember, to cut into strips to fasten the specimens in my fern collection.  I’ve got a dozen and a half books, but there will not be one too many.  You see eight will go at once, with the four seasons ’on my face,’ and the four ‘on my back.’  Then I want two or three for the garden.  For one thing I must have a list of our perennials.  I am collecting a good lot.  Old Isaac has brought me no end of new ones out of different gardens in the village, and now the villagers know I want them, they bring me plants from all kinds of out-of-the-way places, when they go to see their friends.  I’ve taken to it a good deal the last few weeks, and I’ll tell you why.  It was the week before you ran away that Bob Furniss came up one evening, and for a long time I could not think what he was after.  He brought me a Jack-in-the-green polyanthus and a crimson Bergamot from his mother, and he set them and watered them, and said he ’reckoned flowers was a nice pastime for any one that was afflicted,’ but I felt sure he’d got something more to say, and at last it came out.  He is vexed that he used to play truant so at school and never learned anything.  He can’t read a newspaper, and he can’t write or reckon, and he said he was ‘shamed’ to go to school and learn among little boys, and he knew I was a good scholar, and he’d come to ask if I would teach him now and then in the evening,