C/O LEACOCK & CO.
FUNCHAL,
MADEIRA.
_15 Jan. 1905._
It is good to see your hand and kind of you to write to me, especially
as I fear that writing is not so easy to you as it once was. I do very
earnestly hope that things go fairly well with you and that you have
not much pain. Yesterday I was thinking a lot of your courage and my
cowardice for I took an off day--off from the biography I mean--and
attained an altitude of (say) 5250 feet (a cog-wheel railway saving
me 2000 thereof, however) and I was bounding about up there like a
kid of the goats--and very base I thought myself not to be lecturing.
There is not much left of me avoirdupoisly speaking; but that little
bounds along when it has had a good sunning; and to-day I have a rubbed
heel and a permanent thirst as in the good old days. Missing a train
on said railway I made the last part of the descent in the special
Madeira fashion on a sledge glissading down over polished cobble stone
pavement--a youth running behind to hold the thing back by a rope: it
gives the unaccustomed a pretty little squirm at starting. Up in the
hills it is a pleasant world--you pass through many different zones of
vegetation very rapidly--at one moment all is laurel and heath--you
cross a well-marked line and all is tilling--then you are out among
dead bracken on an open hill-top that might be English. Get on a sledge
and wiss (or is it wiz?) you go down to the sugar and bananas through
bignonia and bougainvillia which blind you by their ferocity.