On the day before Henrietta began her journey to the island, Mason came from his farm in Pulteney with a tin of gingersnaps for the train ride and a big white canvas hat that tied with two strips of muslin under her chin. He was wearing the blue-checked shirt he knew she particularly liked. She could feel him trying to get her alone, but instead she sat steadfastly with her mother at the table, making lists of what she should bring and what she would read during this stretch of uninterrupted time. She’d been catching up with Darwin’s work since Daphne first led her, years ago, to an acceptance of his great theory. Reading slowly and carefully as her interest deepened, filling pages with notes, repeating some of his experiments and adapting them for her students. But there was no catching up to Daphne.

Daphne wrote to Darwin, and was answered. Daphne wrote to Asa Gray. Daphne wrote about climbing plants and burrowing spiders, publishing more and more articles and then a book, and another and another, earning enough money from those (and also from the part of her writing life she kept quiet) to stop teaching at the academy where she’d been working when they met. Henrietta fell even further behind. Not giving up; but working more slowly than she wished. Only in the summers could she pursue her own investigations wholeheartedly, keeping the thread alive during the school year by stealing an hour or two at night, after her lessons were prepared.

Her “work”—what did she mean by that, exactly? In the libraries of central New York, you can find files of the horticultural and agricultural society bulletins so popular toward the end of the nineteenth century. The New York Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin. The Rural New-Yorker. The Bulletin of the Buffalo Naturalists’ Field Club. The Western New York Horticultural Society Bulletin. Transactions of the New-York State Agricultural Society. In them are accounts of meetings and county fairs; brief observations about local growing conditions, new seeds and breeds, keeping a clean dairy; longer articles too, weaving multiple sources and reports into an overview for the farmer. Daphne was writing pieces like that when she and Henrietta met; now Henrietta wrote them. “The White Grub of the May Beetle.” One or two a year, carefully observed, clearly written, thoughtfully and thoroughly referenced. Useful to students and farmers alike. Together they give a sense of her steady progress through the years, although they don’t suggest the work she did with and for Daphne. There’s a hint of that in a letter she wrote to Mason during the first week of her stay at Appledore Island: