My dear Nicholson,

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        I have been (as many others) a sufferer by the weather from slight bronchitis, exasperated by the coughs and noseblowings of the students, and by an ill-arrangement of the class-rooms. I had nothing serious, but enough to force me to spend my evenings in bed, from seven o'clock almost, and keep me three entire days away from college. I have been . . . busy . . . with a Latin Robinson Crusoe, rewritten quite freely (not a translation), that I have not been able to get back just now to Arabic; and have buried your letter in papers so deep that I lost much time the other day in a vain search for it. . . . In writing on Robinson's island I found my botany sadly at a loss, and have hunted the Penny Cyclopædia diligently and uselessly to learn the simplest things, such as: To an equinoctial climate, when is the spring and when the autumn? Do the leaves fall twice, or not at all? When is the chief cold? Is it when the sun is lowest, or when the clouds are thickest? Or does it depend on hail and electric phenomena, or on local relation to great mountains?