From Horace Darwin to Emma Darwin 26 August 1876

Dear Mother

I have got rather stuck in my work here, & I cant do any-thing more till I see Mr. Easton; I wrote to him the other day to say I wanted to see him, but I have not heard yet, what I hoped he would do would have been for him to have asked me to his country house for the Sunday but he has not done it, so I expect I shall come up to town some day next week. I think the Litches must be used to being nearly killed by an accident, but I don’t expect that makes it any pleasanter; I hope to hear good accounts of them soon. I have sent off the “Dilemma” today; I had not strength of mind to miss the last vol. but skimmed it; I should like to catch Col. Chesney and lock him up, & not let him out till he had made a good 2 Volled novel out of it; I have been swearing at him so fearfully; he ought to have made at the end of the second vol, Yorke go to the hills & marry Olivia, & then end, & then it would have left a pleasant taste in ones mouth, & now it only makes one very angry. I think that under these conditions, it would have made a first rate story; every thing he writes to my mind is so very vivid; & the account of the Indian ordinary life was very interesting. I got the proofs of the Dynamometer paper yesterday; they have cut it down at bit, & altered it too in detail a bit, but it is considerably improved I think, but in one place they had introduced an error, wh. I had to alter. This afternoon after I had been showing Baker some things in arithmetic, he said, “I expect your governor would think me a damned rum lot if he was to see me; but any how he don’t know everything; he could not go down a well & set the pumps, could he?”, to which I answered that I did not think Father would like the job. Baker has got the regular workman’s weakness of not liking to show his ignorance, & did not like not being able to do the sums I had been setting, so he comforted himself by, thinking that Father could not set the pumps. I have been having tea regularly with him & the “missus” & he calls his wife. Ive got my bicycle mended at last, & he lives in my sitting room. Ive got back to the lodging I was at before, but they are cheaper.

Yours ever | H Darwin