about your health, which is
shameful. We both do heartily rejoice that you are better, and only
hope for everybody's sake and your own, you will nurse and husband
your strength....

Your affectionate old friend,
JOHN FREDERICTON.

TO A.E.

April 10, 1880.

* * * * *

The night before last I dined with Jean Ingelow. I went in to dinner
with Alfred Hunt (a water-colour painter to whose work Ruskin is
devoted). A _very_ unaffected, intelligent, agreeable man; we had a
very pleasant chat. On my other side sat a dear old Arctic Explorer,
old _Ray_. I fell quite in love with him, and with the nice Scotch
accent that overtook him when he got excited. Born and bred in the
Orkneys, almost, as he said, _in the sea_; this wild boyhood of
familiarity with winds and waves, and storms and sports, was the
beginning of the life of adventure and exploration he has led. He told
me some very interesting things about Sir John Franklin. He said that
great and good as he was there were qualities which he had not, the
lack of which he believed cost him his life. He said Sir John went
well and gallantly at his end, if he could keep to the lines he had
laid down; but he had not "fertility of resource for the unforeseen,"
and didn't _adapt_ himself. As an instance, he said, he always made
his carriers _march_ along a given line. If stores were at A, and the
point to be reached B, by the straight line from A to B he would send
the local men he had _hired_ through bog and over boulder, whereas if
he said to any of them, "B is the place you must meet me at," with
the knowledge of natives and the instinct of savages they would have
gone with half the labour and twice the speed. He said too that
Franklin's party suffered terribly because none of his officers were
_sportsmen_, which, he said, simply means starvation if your stores
fail you. We had a long talk about scientific men and their
_deductions_, and he said quaintly, "Ye see, I've just had a lot of
rough expeerience from me childhood; and things have happened now and
again that make me not just put implicit faith in all scientific
dicta. I must tell you, Mrs. Ewing, that when I was a young man, and
just back from America and the Arctic Regions, where I'd lived and
hunted from a mere laddie, I went to a lecture delivered by one of the
verra _first_ men of the day (whose name for that reason I won't give
to ye) before some three thousand listeners and t