My dear Darwin

Five years since I bought a house in Cromwell Crescent, & therefore have had no opportunity since then of seeing the old stones.²

A great ivy tree or bush covered the whole of the back of the house right up to the roof. It yielded a plentiful supply of fallen leaves which were not allowed to accumulate on the paved space mentioned in my letters,³ but were generally burned in the slip of garden ground into which the steps led. When we were away some 3 or 4 months in summer I do not know what our married policeman in charge did with them. From the great size of the stem the ivy was probably planted soon after the building of the house. The walls of the garden were in my time more or less covered with ivy and there were other evergreens & rose bushes about besides those numbered 1 & 2 in the new place which I enclose. The house is the 4^th from Holland Park, and the trees in it contributed an occasional supply of leaves when the wind blew from the west. I have no recollection of ever having seen weeds growing in the interstices. If they did grow my habits are of a kind that would have induced their prompt removal.

I ought perhaps to mention that I sometimes buried dead leaves in the adjacent flower plots.

Worm castings were common enough in the little pavement and always at the interstices where the stones joined. It was that fact that first led me to reflect on the cause that produced the sinking of the pavement.

If I have not made everything clear please let me know.

I have lately crossed France twice 1^st to Aix les Bains to meet my wife and daughter⁴ on their way home from a winter in the South, & then back by way of Geneva where I went to see Favre.⁵ I noticed a great number of dead trees all through France, the result of last winters cold.⁶ One large orchard had not a living tree in it.

Believe me | Yours very sincerely | And^w C Ramsay

I am getting old & seedy, & shall never climb a big mountain again.