5 LEON Y CASTILLO, TELDE, GRAN CANARIA. _30 December, 1901._
Here I am lying in the sun which shines as if it were June and not December. This year our "finca" is in the midst of a "pueblo." The front of our house faces a high street which is none too clean--but then you keep the front of your house so shut up that you see nothing of the street and at the back all is orange and coffee and banana and so forth. Telde is the centre of an important trade in tomatos--the whole village is employed in the work of packing them for the English market and sending them off to the shops in Las Palmas. Really it has become a very big industry in these last years and if English people gave up eating tomatos, hundreds of Canarios would be in a bad way. But there! You don't want to hear of foreign parts, and if we could meet our talk would be of Cambridge....
I am told that I have been put back into the Press Syndicate. I do not refuse and shall be very glad if in any way I can further the interests of the big history. The first volume is with me and I enjoy it.
5, LEON Y CASTILLO, TELDE, LAS PALMAS, GRAN CANARIA. _20 Jan. 1902._
I was glad of your letter. I had been in a poor way and it cheered me. Now I am doing well and ride a bit on my cycle along one of the three roads of the island. I thought that you would like _Joh. Althusius_ if you could penetrate the shell[28]. I like all that man's books, and his history of things in general as seen from the point of view of a student of corporations is full of good stuff, besides being to all appearance appallingly learned. I rather fancy that Hobbes's political feat consisted in giving a new twist to some well worn theories of the juristic order and then inventing a psychology which would justify that twist. I shall be very much interested to hear what you have to say about the old gentleman. A many years ago I saw in the Museum a copy of the _Leviathan_ with a note telling how the wretched old atheist was buried head downwards or face downwards or something of the sort in a garden--a nice little legend in the making!
Have you read _De Mirabilibus Pecci_? Stevenson the Anglo-Saxon scholar, who travelled outwards with me, told me that the first recorded appearance of the name of the Peak (something like Pecesus) shows that the great cavern was called after the Devil's hinder parts. Did Hobbes know that? What a thing it is to be a philologer!