All our plans have been upset by the Fohn wind, which gave us four days’ continuous downpour here—­upset the roads, and flooded the Chiavenna to Colico Railway.  We hear that the latter is not yet repaired.

I was going to write to you at the Vittoria, but thought you could have hardly got there yet.  We took rooms there a week ago, and then had to countermand them.  If there are any letters kicking about for us, will you ask them to send them on?

By way of an additional complication, my poor wife gave herself an unlucky strain this morning, and even if the railway is mended I do not think she will be fit to travel for two or three days.  We are very disappointed.  What is to be done?

I am wonderfully better.  So long as I am taking active exercise and the weather is dry, I am quite comfortable, and only discover that I have a heart when I am kept quiet by bad weather or get my liver out of order.  Here I can walk nine or ten miles up hill and down dale without difficulty or fatigue.  What I may be able to do elsewhere is doubtful.

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

It would do you and Mrs. Foster a great deal of good to come up here. 
Not out of your way at all!  Oh dear no!

Zurich, October 4, 1888.

My dear Foster,

I should have written to you at Stresa, but I had mislaid your postcard, and it did not turn up till too late.

We made up our minds after all that we would as soon not go down to the Lakes—­where the ground would be drying up after the inundations—­so we went the other way over the Julier to Tiefenkasten, and from T. to Ragatz, where we stayed a week.  Ragatz was hot and steamy at first—­cold and steamy afterwards—­but earlier in the season, I should think, it would be pleasant.

Last Monday we migrated here, and have had the vilest weather until to-day.  All yesterday it rained cats and dogs.

To-day we are off to Neuhausen (Schweitzerhof) to have a look at the Rhine falls.  If it is pleasant we may stop there a few days.  Then we go to Stuttgart, on our way to Nuremberg, which neither of us have seen.  We shall be at the “Bavarian Hotel,” and a letter will catch us there, if you have anything to say, I daresay up to the middle of the month.  After that Frankfort, and then home.

We do not find long railway journeys very good for either of us, and I am trying to keep within six hours at a stretch.

I am not so vigorous as I was at Maloja, but still infinitely better than when I left England.

I hope the mosquitoes left something of you in Venice.  When I was there in October there were none!

My wife joins with me in love to Mrs. Foster and yourself.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[Some friendly chaff in Sir M. Foster’s reply to the latter contains at least a real indication of the way in which Huxley became the centre of the little society at the Maloja:—­]