From Leonard Darwin to Emma Darwin 15–17 May [1875]

Dear mother

I am in a very bad temper just at present from a variety of causes; I sent a man down to the post office to get my letters, and after he had come back saying there were none I went down myself and of course it was just shut up, but with a list outside on which my name appeared so I shall have to wait till tomorrow. I am suffering agonies from ready made boots I almost wish I had got the gout as a counter irritant  My feet are not the regulation shape at all and I must get a pair made. Having blown off steam I will proceed to business. From Chicago I went on to Washington and stopped there about 3 days. I had a card introduction from an American transit of Venus man to one of the Astronomers at the Observatory, which opened the doors of that institution to me, and every one was wonderfully civil to me. One of the ""professors"" there had been in the American Engineers, Royal Engineers I was going to have said, and we struck up a sort of friendship. He took me to look through the great telescope there, the biggest of its kind in the world, and I saw the moons of Uranus, at least every one else saw them and I said I did. The systems on which this observatory and the Greenwich one are worked are entirely different; at Greenwich every thing goes on like clock work and no one is expected to use his brains at all except the Astronomer Royal. Here all the assistants are highly educated men, all of them gentlemen; but the head of the institution is an old admiral who does not know much about it. The result is that with better material they do not turn out such good work, and there is not such good discipline. I am very much afraid that a long letter I wrote from New Zealand went down in the Schiller, and that you will have been kept waiting for letters for some time. I made friends with the mail agent on board the steamer, and he put my letter in with the mail on the ship, to save me the trouble of posting it at San Francisco.

Monday

I have just been down to the post office, and have good two nice long letters from William and Bessie—and still I am not happy. After a great deal of enquiry I found that there were three more letters for me, which had been sent to Washington to be kept safe— I hope that they have not been sent home for one of them is from my dearest friend Cox and Co and without it I shall be absolutely pennyless in a few days. I went up to Cambridge and called on the Nortons yesterday and was received with open arms, and spent a very pleasant evening there  They sent all sorts of messages home to you. I am going up there to dinner tomorrow. I called on the Grays also, and found that M^rs. Grays step mother had just died so that I expect not to see much of them. It is a lovely day out so I must leave off. I have almost determined to take my passage home in the Algeria. June 16 Cunard Line (which has never had an accident)

Your affec son | Leonard Darwin