This morning B. and S. wrote back, and are obliged to confess that "a yellow Fritillary has been produced," but (not being the producers) they add, "It is not a good yellow." _Pour moi_, I take leave to judge of colours as well as Barr and Sugden, and can assure you it is a very lovely yellow, pale and chrome-y. It has been like a chapter out of Alphonse Karr!
One of the horticultural papers is just about to publish Mr. Ellacombe's old list of the things he has grown in his own garden. Three thousand species!
I hope you liked that _Daily Telegraph_ article on the Back Gardener I sent you? It is really fine workmanship in the writing line as well as being amusing. I abuse the Press often enough, but I will say such Essays (for they well deserve the name) are a great credit to the age--in Penny Dailies!!!
"The Nursery Nonsense of the Birds," "A Stratified Chronology of Occupancies," "Waves of Whims," etc., etc., are the work of a man who can use his tools with a master's hand, or at least a _skilled_ worker's!
I am reading another French novel, by Daudet, _Jack_. So far (as I have got) it is marvellous _writing_. "Le petit Roi--Dahomey" in the school "des pays chauds" is a Dickenesque character, but quite marvellous--his fate--his "gri-gri"--his final Departure to the land where all things are so "made new" that "the former" do not "come into mind"--having in that supreme hour _forgotten_ alike his sufferings, his tormentors, and his friends--and only babbling in Dahomeian in that last dream in which his spirit returned to its first earthly home before "going home" for Good!--is superb!!! The possible meanness and brutality of civilized man in Paris--the possible grandeur and obvious immortality of the smallest, youngest, "gri-gri" worshipping nigger of Dahomey oh it is wonderful altogether, and I should fancy SUCH a sketch of the _incompris_ poet and the rest of the clique!! "_C'est_ LUI."
I am sending you a number of "Jackanapes" in case you have lost your other.
I have made marks against places from some of which I think you could select easy scenes; I mean easy in the sense of being on the lines where your genius has so often worked.
I will put some notes about each at the end of my letter. What I now want to ask you is whether you _could_ do me a few illustrations of the vignette kind for "Jackanapes," so that it might come out at Christmas. Christmas _ought_ to mean October! so it would of course be very delightful if you could have completed them in September--and as soon as might be. But do not WORRY your brain about dates. I would rather give it up than let you feel the fetters of Time, which, when they drag one at one's work, makes the labour double. But if you will begin them, and _see_ if they come pretty readily to your fingers, I shall only too well understand it if after all you can't finish in time for this season!