WCP157

[1]

Parkstone

Feb. 8^th 1893

My dear Will

I send you two guineas for your entrance fee & subscription this year to the Electrical Institution. I hope you will earn enough next year to keep it up out of your salary. I also send some anyday Zoo. tickets and another Sunday. I am glad to say I am slowly getting better though not quite well yet. (If you sign your name across back of the cheque & send it to the Secretary it will be all right.) [2] After having lost several good plants in the Greenhouse by that hard frost in early January, I have determined to settle its hash by a good boiler & pipes, which are now fixed & work very well. I have arranged with old Wareham to come morning & night to look after it & stoke up. It has now been going a fortnight & the greenhouse always feels warm & comfortable. Of course it is becoming more like an ordinary greenhouse full of pots, but that can’t be helped. We have a fine lot of snowdrops now out on the bank, & several [3] primroses & winter-aconites, Christmas roses &c. and in another week or two shall have a good many gquills, crocuses, early saxifrages &c. &c.

You heard I suppose that poor old Major Lang is dead, — never recovered from his broken thigh. Violet is still grinding away at her "Lessons on Familiar Animals", — and I am getting ready to write reviews and articles as usual. I hope you & Portheum are getting on well with your evening studies. You might have giving us a little account of his house & family at Hampstead, so that we can realise (or visualise) a little more about him & his. I suppose you have your cycle again. Do you ride out together? Mr. Silk says a godson of his is at Siemens’, named Edgar Williams. Do you know him?

Your affectionate Pa | Alfred R. Wallace [signature]