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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, by Robert Louis
+Stevenson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin
+
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+
+
+Release Date: September 14, 2012  [eBook #698]
+[This file was first posted on October 25, 1996]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1901 Charles Scribner’s Sons edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+                                  MEMOIR
+                                    OF
+                             FLEEMING JENKIN
+
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                    BY
+                          ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                 NEW YORK
+                         CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
+                                   1901
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.
+
+
+ON the death of Fleeming Jenkin, his family and friends determined to
+publish a selection of his various papers; by way of introduction, the
+following pages were drawn up; and the whole, forming two considerable
+volumes, has been issued in England.  In the States, it has not been
+thought advisable to reproduce the whole; and the memoir appearing alone,
+shorn of that other matter which was at once its occasion and its
+justification, so large an account of a man so little known may seem to a
+stranger out of all proportion.  But Jenkin was a man much more
+remarkable than the mere bulk or merit of his work approves him.  It was
+in the world, in the commerce of friendship, by his brave attitude
+towards life, by his high moral value and unwearied intellectual effort,
+that he struck the minds of his contemporaries.  His was an individual
+figure, such as authors delight to draw, and all men to read of, in the
+pages of a novel.  His was a face worth painting for its own sake.  If
+the sitter shall not seem to have justified the portrait, if Jenkin,
+after his death, shall not continue to make new friends, the fault will
+be altogether mine.
+
+                                                                   R. L S.
+
+SARANAC, _Oct._, 1887.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+The Jenkins of Stowting—Fleeming’s grandfather—Mrs. Buckner’s
+fortune—Fleeming’s father; goes to sea; at St. Helena; meets King Tom;
+service in the West Indies; end of his career—The
+Campbell-Jacksons—Fleeming’s mother—Fleeming’s uncle John.
+
+IN the reign of Henry VIII., a family of the name of Jenkin, claiming to
+come from York, and bearing the arms of Jenkin ap Philip of St. Melans,
+are found reputably settled in the county of Kent.  Persons of strong
+genealogical pinion pass from William Jenkin, Mayor of Folkestone in
+1555, to his contemporary ‘John Jenkin, of the Citie of York, Receiver
+General of the County,’ and thence, by way of Jenkin ap Philip, to the
+proper summit of any Cambrian pedigree—a prince; ‘Guaith Voeth, Lord of
+Cardigan,’ the name and style of him.  It may suffice, however, for the
+present, that these Kentish Jenkins must have undoubtedly derived from
+Wales, and being a stock of some efficiency, they struck root and grew to
+wealth and consequence in their new home.
+
+Of their consequence we have proof enough in the fact that not only was
+William Jenkin (as already mentioned) Mayor of Folkestone in 1555, but no
+less than twenty-three times in the succeeding century and a half, a
+Jenkin (William, Thomas, Henry, or Robert) sat in the same place of
+humble honour.  Of their wealth we know that in the reign of Charles I.,
+Thomas Jenkin of Eythorne was more than once in the market buying land,
+and notably, in 1633, acquired the manor of Stowting Court.  This was an
+estate of some 320 acres, six miles from Hythe, in the Bailiwick and
+Hundred of Stowting, and the Lathe of Shipway, held of the Crown _in
+capite_ by the service of six men and a constable to defend the passage
+of the sea at Sandgate.  It had a chequered history before it fell into
+the hands of Thomas of Eythorne, having been sold and given from one to
+another—to the Archbishop, to Heringods, to the Burghershes, to Pavelys,
+Trivets, Cliffords, Wenlocks, Beauchamps, Nevilles, Kempes, and Clarkes:
+a piece of Kentish ground condemned to see new faces and to be no man’s
+home.  But from 1633 onward it became the anchor of the Jenkin family in
+Kent; and though passed on from brother to brother, held in shares
+between uncle and nephew, burthened by debts and jointures, and at least
+once sold and bought in again, it remains to this day in the hands of the
+direct line.  It is not my design, nor have I the necessary knowledge, to
+give a history of this obscure family.  But this is an age when genealogy
+has taken a new lease of life, and become for the first time a human
+science; so that we no longer study it in quest of the Guaith Voeths, but
+to trace out some of the secrets of descent and destiny; and as we study,
+we think less of Sir Bernard Burke and more of Mr. Galton.  Not only do
+our character and talents lie upon the anvil and receive their temper
+during generations; but the very plot of our life’s story unfolds itself
+on a scale of centuries, and the biography of the man is only an episode
+in the epic of the family.  From this point of view I ask the reader’s
+leave to begin this notice of a remarkable man who was my friend, with
+the accession of his great-grandfather, John Jenkin.
+
+This John Jenkin, a grandson of Damaris Kingsley, of the family of
+‘Westward Ho!’ was born in 1727, and married Elizabeth, daughter of
+Thomas Frewen, of Church House, Northiam.  The Jenkins had now been long
+enough intermarrying with their Kentish neighbours to be Kentish folk
+themselves in all but name; and with the Frewens in particular their
+connection is singularly involved.  John and his wife were each descended
+in the third degree from another Thomas Frewen, Vicar of Northiam, and
+brother to Accepted Frewen, Archbishop of York.  John’s mother had
+married a Frewen for a second husband.  And the last complication was to
+be added by the Bishop of Chichester’s brother, Charles Buckner,
+Vice-Admiral of the White, who was twice married, first to a paternal
+cousin of Squire John, and second to Anne, only sister of the Squire’s
+wife, and already the widow of another Frewen.  The reader must bear Mrs.
+Buckner in mind; it was by means of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin began
+life as a poor man.  Meanwhile, the relationship of any Frewen to any
+Jenkin at the end of these evolutions presents a problem almost
+insoluble; and we need not wonder if Mrs. John, thus exercised in her
+immediate circle, was in her old age ‘a great genealogist of all Sussex
+families, and much consulted.’  The names Frewen and Jenkin may almost
+seem to have been interchangeable at will; and yet Fate proceeds with
+such particularity that it was perhaps on the point of name that the
+family was ruined.
+
+The John Jenkins had a family of one daughter and five extravagant and
+unpractical sons.  The eldest, Stephen, entered the Church and held the
+living of Salehurst, where he offered, we may hope, an extreme example of
+the clergy of the age.  He was a handsome figure of a man; jovial and
+jocular; fond of his garden, which produced under his care the finest
+fruits of the neighbourhood; and like all the family, very choice in
+horses.  He drove tandem; like Jehu, furiously.  His saddle horse,
+Captain (for the names of horses are piously preserved in the family
+chronicle which I follow), was trained to break into a gallop as soon as
+the vicar’s foot was thrown across its back; nor would the rein be drawn
+in the nine miles between Northiam and the Vicarage door.  Debt was the
+man’s proper element; he used to skulk from arrest in the chancel of his
+church; and the speed of Captain may have come sometimes handy.  At an
+early age this unconventional parson married his cook, and by her he had
+two daughters and one son.  One of the daughters died unmarried; the
+other imitated her father, and married ‘imprudently.’  The son, still
+more gallantly continuing the tradition, entered the army, loaded himself
+with debt, was forced to sell out, took refuge in the Marines, and was
+lost on the Dogger Bank in the war-ship _Minotaur_.  If he did not marry
+below him, like his father, his sister, and a certain great-uncle
+William, it was perhaps because he never married at all.
+
+The second brother, Thomas, who was employed in the General Post-Office,
+followed in all material points the example of Stephen, married ‘not very
+creditably,’ and spent all the money he could lay his hands on.  He died
+without issue; as did the fourth brother, John, who was of weak intellect
+and feeble health, and the fifth brother, William, whose brief career as
+one of Mrs. Buckner’s satellites will fall to be considered later on.  So
+soon, then, as the _Minotaur_ had struck upon the Dogger Bank, Stowting
+and the line of the Jenkin family fell on the shoulders of the third
+brother, Charles.
+
+Facility and self-indulgence are the family marks; facility (to judge by
+these imprudent marriages) being at once their quality and their defect;
+but in the case of Charles, a man of exceptional beauty and sweetness
+both of face and disposition, the family fault had quite grown to be a
+virtue, and we find him in consequence the drudge and milk-cow of his
+relatives.  Born in 1766, Charles served at sea in his youth, and smelt
+both salt water and powder.  The Jenkins had inclined hitherto, as far as
+I can make out, to the land service.  Stephen’s son had been a soldier;
+William (fourth of Stowting) had been an officer of the unhappy
+Braddock’s in America, where, by the way, he owned and afterwards sold an
+estate on the James River, called, after the parental seat; of which I
+should like well to hear if it still bears the name.  It was probably by
+the influence of Captain Buckner, already connected with the family by
+his first marriage, that Charles Jenkin turned his mind in the direction
+of the navy; and it was in Buckner’s own ship, the _Prothée_, 64, that
+the lad made his only campaign.  It was in the days of Rodney’s war, when
+the _Prothée_, we read, captured two large privateers to windward of
+Barbadoes, and was ‘materially and distinguishedly engaged’ in both the
+actions with De Grasse.  While at sea Charles kept a journal, and made
+strange archaic pilot-book sketches, part plan, part elevation, some of
+which survive for the amusement of posterity.  He did a good deal of
+surveying, so that here we may perhaps lay our finger on the beginning of
+Fleeming’s education as an engineer.  What is still more strange, among
+the relics of the handsome midshipman and his stay in the gun-room of the
+_Prothée_, I find a code of signals graphically represented, for all the
+world as it would have been done by his grandson.
+
+On the declaration of peace, Charles, because he had suffered from
+scurvy, received his mother’s orders to retire; and he was not the man to
+refuse a request, far less to disobey a command.  Thereupon he turned
+farmer, a trade he was to practice on a large scale; and we find him
+married to a Miss Schirr, a woman of some fortune, the daughter of a
+London merchant.  Stephen, the not very reverend, was still alive,
+galloping about the country or skulking in his chancel.  It does not
+appear whether he let or sold the paternal manor to Charles; one or
+other, it must have been; and the sailor-farmer settled at Stowting, with
+his wife, his mother, his unmarried sister, and his sick brother John.
+Out of the six people of whom his nearest family consisted, three were in
+his own house, and two others (the horse-leeches, Stephen and Thomas) he
+appears to have continued to assist with more amiability than wisdom.  He
+hunted, belonged to the Yeomanry, owned famous horses, Maggie and Lucy,
+the latter coveted by royalty itself.  ‘Lord Rokeby, his neighbour,
+called him kinsman,’ writes my artless chronicler, ‘and altogether life
+was very cheery.’  At Stowting his three sons, John, Charles, and Thomas
+Frewen, and his younger daughter, Anna, were all born to him; and the
+reader should here be told that it is through the report of this second
+Charles (born 1801) that he has been looking on at these confused
+passages of family history.
+
+In the year 1805 the ruin of the Jenkins was begun.  It was the work of a
+fallacious lady already mentioned, Aunt Anne Frewen, a sister of Mrs.
+John.  Twice married, first to her cousin Charles Frewen, clerk to the
+Court of Chancery, Brunswick Herald, and Usher of the Black Rod, and
+secondly to Admiral Buckner, she was denied issue in both beds, and being
+very rich—she died worth about 60,000_l._, mostly in land—she was in
+perpetual quest of an heir.  The mirage of this fortune hung before
+successive members of the Jenkin family until her death in 1825, when it
+dissolved and left the latest Alnaschar face to face with bankruptcy.
+The grandniece, Stephen’s daughter, the one who had not ‘married
+imprudently,’ appears to have been the first; for she was taken abroad by
+the golden aunt, and died in her care at Ghent in 1792.  Next she adopted
+William, the youngest of the five nephews; took him abroad with her—it
+seems as if that were in the formula; was shut up with him in Paris by
+the Revolution; brought him back to Windsor, and got him a place in the
+King’s Body-Guard, where he attracted the notice of George III. by his
+proficiency in German.  In 1797, being on guard at St. James’s Palace,
+William took a cold which carried him off; and Aunt Anne was once more
+left heirless.  Lastly, in 1805, perhaps moved by the Admiral, who had a
+kindness for his old midshipman, perhaps pleased by the good looks and
+the good nature of the man himself, Mrs. Buckner turned her eyes upon
+Charles Jenkin.  He was not only to be the heir, however, he was to be
+the chief hand in a somewhat wild scheme of family farming.  Mrs. Jenkin,
+the mother, contributed 164 acres of land; Mrs. Buckner, 570, some at
+Northiam, some farther off; Charles let one-half of Stowting to a tenant,
+and threw the other and various scattered parcels into the common
+enterprise; so that the whole farm amounted to near upon a thousand
+acres, and was scattered over thirty miles of country.  The ex-seaman of
+thirty-nine, on whose wisdom and ubiquity the scheme depended, was to
+live in the meanwhile without care or fear.  He was to check himself in
+nothing; his two extravagances, valuable horses and worthless brothers,
+were to be indulged in comfort; and whether the year quite paid itself or
+not, whether successive years left accumulated savings or only a growing
+deficit, the fortune of the golden aunt should in the end repair all.
+
+On this understanding Charles Jenkin transported his family to Church
+House, Northiam: Charles the second, then a child of three, among the
+number.  Through the eyes of the boy we have glimpses of the life that
+followed: of Admiral and Mrs. Buckner driving up from Windsor in a coach
+and six, two post-horses and their own four; of the house full of
+visitors, the great roasts at the fire, the tables in the servants’ hall
+laid for thirty or forty for a month together; of the daily press of
+neighbours, many of whom, Frewens, Lords, Bishops, Batchellors, and
+Dynes, were also kinsfolk; and the parties ‘under the great spreading
+chestnuts of the old fore court,’ where the young people danced and made
+merry to the music of the village band.  Or perhaps, in the depth of
+winter, the father would bid young Charles saddle his pony; they would
+ride the thirty miles from Northiam to Stowting, with the snow to the
+pony’s saddle girths, and be received by the tenants like princes.
+
+This life of delights, with the continual visible comings and goings of
+the golden aunt, was well qualified to relax the fibre of the lads.
+John, the heir, a yeoman and a fox-hunter, ‘loud and notorious with his
+whip and spurs,’ settled down into a kind of Tony Lumpkin, waiting for
+the shoes of his father and his aunt.  Thomas Frewen, the youngest, is
+briefly dismissed as ‘a handsome beau’; but he had the merit or the good
+fortune to become a doctor of medicine, so that when the crash came he
+was not empty-handed for the war of life.  Charles, at the day-school of
+Northiam, grew so well acquainted with the rod, that his floggings became
+matter of pleasantry and reached the ears of Admiral Buckner.  Hereupon
+that tall, rough-voiced, formidable uncle entered with the lad into a
+covenant: every time that Charles was thrashed he was to pay the Admiral
+a penny; everyday that he escaped, the process was to be reversed.  ‘I
+recollect,’ writes Charles, ‘going crying to my mother to be taken to the
+Admiral to pay my debt.’  It would seem by these terms the speculation
+was a losing one; yet it is probable it paid indirectly by bringing the
+boy under remark.  The Admiral was no enemy to dunces; he loved courage,
+and Charles, while yet little more than a baby, would ride the great
+horse into the pond.  Presently it was decided that here was the stuff of
+a fine sailor; and at an early period the name of Charles Jenkin was
+entered on a ship’s books.
+
+From Northiam he was sent to another school at Boonshill, near Rye, where
+the master took ‘infinite delight’ in strapping him.  ‘It keeps me warm
+and makes you grow,’ he used to say.  And the stripes were not altogether
+wasted, for the dunce, though still very ‘raw,’ made progress with his
+studies.  It was known, moreover, that he was going to sea, always a
+ground of pre-eminence with schoolboys; and in his case the glory was not
+altogether future, it wore a present form when he came driving to Rye
+behind four horses in the same carriage with an admiral.  ‘I was not a
+little proud, you may believe,’ says he.
+
+In 1814, when he was thirteen years of age, he was carried by his father
+to Chichester to the Bishop’s Palace.  The Bishop had heard from his
+brother the Admiral that Charles was likely to do well, and had an order
+from Lord Melville for the lad’s admission to the Royal Naval College at
+Portsmouth.  Both the Bishop and the Admiral patted him on the head and
+said, ‘Charles will restore the old family’; by which I gather with some
+surprise that, even in these days of open house at Northiam and golden
+hope of my aunt’s fortune, the family was supposed to stand in need of
+restoration.  But the past is apt to look brighter than nature, above all
+to those enamoured of their genealogy; and the ravages of Stephen and
+Thomas must have always given matter of alarm.
+
+What with the flattery of bishops and admirals, the fine company in which
+he found himself at Portsmouth, his visits home, with their gaiety and
+greatness of life, his visits to Mrs. Buckner (soon a widow) at Windsor,
+where he had a pony kept for him, and visited at Lord Melville’s and Lord
+Harcourt’s and the Leveson-Gowers, he began to have ‘bumptious notions,’
+and his head was ‘somewhat turned with fine people’; as to some extent it
+remained throughout his innocent and honourable life.
+
+In this frame of mind the boy was appointed to the _Conqueror_, Captain
+Davie, humorously known as Gentle Johnnie.  The captain had earned this
+name by his style of discipline, which would have figured well in the
+pages of Marryat: ‘Put the prisoner’s head in a bag and give him another
+dozen!’ survives as a specimen of his commands; and the men were often
+punished twice or thrice in a week.  On board the ship of this
+disciplinarian, Charles and his father were carried in a billy-boat from
+Sheerness in December, 1816: Charles with an outfit suitable to his
+pretensions, a twenty-guinea sextant and 120 dollars in silver, which
+were ordered into the care of the gunner.  ‘The old clerks and mates,’ he
+writes, ‘used to laugh and jeer me for joining the ship in a billy-boat,
+and when they found I was from Kent, vowed I was an old Kentish smuggler.
+This to my pride, you will believe, was not a little offensive.’
+
+The _Conqueror_ carried the flag of Vice-Admiral Plampin, commanding at
+the Cape and St. Helena; and at that all-important islet, in July, 1817,
+she relieved the flagship of Sir Pulteney Malcolm.  Thus it befel that
+Charles Jenkin, coming too late for the epic of the French wars, played a
+small part in the dreary and disgraceful afterpiece of St. Helena.  Life
+on the guard-ship was onerous and irksome.  The anchor was never lifted,
+sail never made, the great guns were silent; none was allowed on shore
+except on duty; all day the movements of the imperial captive were
+signalled to and fro; all night the boats rowed guard around the
+accessible portions of the coast.  This prolonged stagnation and petty
+watchfulness in what Napoleon himself called that ‘unchristian’ climate,
+told cruelly on the health of the ship’s company.  In eighteen months,
+according to O’Meara, the _Conqueror_ had lost one hundred and ten men
+and invalided home one hundred and seven, being more than a third of her
+complement.  It does not seem that our young midshipman so much as once
+set eyes on Bonaparte; and yet in other ways Jenkin was more fortunate
+than some of his comrades.  He drew in water-colour; not so badly as his
+father, yet ill enough; and this art was so rare aboard the _Conqueror_
+that even his humble proficiency marked him out and procured him some
+alleviations.  Admiral Plampin had succeeded Napoleon at the Briars; and
+here he had young Jenkin staying with him to make sketches of the
+historic house.  One of these is before me as I write, and gives a
+strange notion of the arts in our old English Navy.  Yet it was again as
+an artist that the lad was taken for a run to Rio, and apparently for a
+second outing in a ten-gun brig.  These, and a cruise of six weeks to
+windward of the island undertaken by the _Conqueror_ herself in quest of
+health, were the only breaks in three years of murderous inaction; and at
+the end of that period Jenkin was invalided home, having ‘lost his health
+entirely.’
+
+As he left the deck of the guard-ship the historic part of his career
+came to an end.  For forty-two years he continued to serve his country
+obscurely on the seas, sometimes thanked for inconspicuous and honourable
+services, but denied any opportunity of serious distinction.  He was
+first two years in the _Larne_, Captain Tait, hunting pirates and keeping
+a watch on the Turkish and Greek squadrons in the Archipelago.  Captain
+Tait was a favourite with Sir Thomas Maitland, High Commissioner of the
+Ionian Islands—King Tom as he was called—who frequently took passage in
+the _Larne_.  King Tom knew every inch of the Mediterranean, and was a
+terror to the officers of the watch.  He would come on deck at night; and
+with his broad Scotch accent, ‘Well, sir,’ he would say, ‘what depth of
+water have ye?  Well now, sound; and ye’ll just find so or so many
+fathoms,’ as the case might be; and the obnoxious passenger was generally
+right.  On one occasion, as the ship was going into Corfu, Sir Thomas
+came up the hatchway and cast his eyes towards the gallows.
+‘Bangham’—Charles Jenkin heard him say to his aide-de-camp, Lord
+Bangham—‘where the devil is that other chap?  I left four fellows hanging
+there; now I can only see three.  Mind there is another there to-morrow.’
+And sure enough there was another Greek dangling the next day.  ‘Captain
+Hamilton, of the _Cambrian_, kept the Greeks in order afloat,’ writes my
+author, ‘and King Tom ashore.’
+
+From 1823 onward, the chief scene of Charles Jenkin’s activities was in
+the West Indies, where he was engaged off and on till 1844, now as a
+subaltern, now in a vessel of his own, hunting out pirates, ‘then very
+notorious’ in the Leeward Islands, cruising after slavers, or carrying
+dollars and provisions for the Government.  While yet a midshipman, he
+accompanied Mr. Cockburn to Caraccas and had a sight of Bolivar.  In the
+brigantine _Griffon_, which he commanded in his last years in the West
+Indies, he carried aid to Guadeloupe after the earthquake, and twice
+earned the thanks of Government: once for an expedition to Nicaragua to
+extort, under threat of a blockade, proper apologies and a sum of money
+due to certain British merchants; and once during an insurrection in San
+Domingo, for the rescue of certain others from a perilous imprisonment
+and the recovery of a ‘chest of money’ of which they had been robbed.
+Once, on the other hand, he earned his share of public censure.  This was
+in 1837, when he commanded the _Romney_ lying in the inner harbour of
+Havannah.  The _Romney_ was in no proper sense a man-of-war; she was a
+slave-hulk, the bonded warehouse of the Mixed Slave Commission; where
+negroes, captured out of slavers under Spanish colours, were detained
+provisionally, till the Commission should decide upon their case and
+either set them free or bind them to apprenticeship.  To this ship,
+already an eye-sore to the authorities, a Cuban slave made his escape.
+The position was invidious; on one side were the tradition of the British
+flag and the state of public sentiment at home; on the other, the
+certainty that if the slave were kept, the _Romney_ would be ordered at
+once out of the harbour, and the object of the Mixed Commission
+compromised.  Without consultation with any other officer, Captain Jenkin
+(then lieutenant) returned the man to shore and took the
+Captain-General’s receipt.  Lord Palmerston approved his course; but the
+zealots of the anti-slave trade movement (never to be named without
+respect) were much dissatisfied; and thirty-nine years later, the matter
+was again canvassed in Parliament, and Lord Palmerston and Captain Jenkin
+defended by Admiral Erskine in a letter to the _Times_ (March 13, 1876).
+
+In 1845, while still lieutenant, Charles Jenkin acted as Admiral Pigot’s
+flag captain in the Cove of Cork, where there were some thirty pennants;
+and about the same time, closed his career by an act of personal bravery.
+He had proceeded with his boats to the help of a merchant vessel, whose
+cargo of combustibles had taken fire and was smouldering under hatches;
+his sailors were in the hold, where the fumes were already heavy, and
+Jenkin was on deck directing operations, when he found his orders were no
+longer answered from below: he jumped down without hesitation and slung
+up several insensible men with his own hand.  For this act, he received a
+letter from the Lords of the Admiralty expressing a sense of his
+gallantry; and pretty soon after was promoted Commander, superseded, and
+could never again obtain employment.
+
+In 1828 or 1829, Charles Jenkin was in the same watch with another
+midshipman, Robert Colin Campbell Jackson, who introduced him to his
+family in Jamaica.  The father, the Honourable Robert Jackson, Custos
+Rotulorum of Kingston, came of a Yorkshire family, said to be originally
+Scotch; and on the mother’s side, counted kinship with some of the
+Forbeses.  The mother was Susan Campbell, one of the Campbells of
+Auchenbreck.  Her father Colin, a merchant in Greenock, is said to have
+been the heir to both the estate and the baronetcy; he claimed neither,
+which casts a doubt upon the fact, but he had pride enough himself, and
+taught enough pride to his family, for any station or descent in
+Christendom.  He had four daughters.  One married an Edinburgh writer, as
+I have it on a first account—a minister, according to another—a man at
+least of reasonable station, but not good enough for the Campbells of
+Auchenbreck; and the erring one was instantly discarded.  Another married
+an actor of the name of Adcock, whom (as I receive the tale) she had seen
+acting in a barn; but the phrase should perhaps be regarded rather as a
+measure of the family annoyance, than a mirror of the facts.  The
+marriage was not in itself unhappy; Adcock was a gentleman by birth and
+made a good husband; the family reasonably prospered, and one of the
+daughters married no less a man than Clarkson Stanfield.  But by the
+father, and the two remaining Miss Campbells, people of fierce passions
+and a truly Highland pride, the derogation was bitterly resented.  For
+long the sisters lived estranged then, Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Adcock were
+reconciled for a moment, only to quarrel the more fiercely; the name of
+Mrs. Adcock was proscribed, nor did it again pass her sister’s lips,
+until the morning when she announced: ‘Mary Adcock is dead; I saw her in
+her shroud last night.’  Second sight was hereditary in the house; and
+sure enough, as I have it reported, on that very night Mrs. Adcock had
+passed away.  Thus, of the four daughters, two had, according to the
+idiotic notions of their friends, disgraced themselves in marriage; the
+others supported the honour of the family with a better grace, and
+married West Indian magnates of whom, I believe, the world has never
+heard and would not care to hear: So strange a thing is this hereditary
+pride.  Of Mr. Jackson, beyond the fact that he was Fleeming’s
+grandfather, I know naught.  His wife, as I have said, was a woman of
+fierce passions; she would tie her house slaves to the bed and lash them
+with her own hand; and her conduct to her wild and down-going sons, was a
+mixture of almost insane self-sacrifice and wholly insane violence of
+temper.  She had three sons and one daughter.  Two of the sons went
+utterly to ruin, and reduced their mother to poverty.  The third went to
+India, a slim, delicate lad, and passed so wholly from the knowledge of
+his relatives that he was thought to be long dead.  Years later, when his
+sister was living in Genoa, a red-bearded man of great strength and
+stature, tanned by years in India, and his hands covered with barbaric
+gems, entered the room unannounced, as she was playing the piano, lifted
+her from her seat, and kissed her.  It was her brother, suddenly returned
+out of a past that was never very clearly understood, with the rank of
+general, many strange gems, many cloudy stories of adventure, and next
+his heart, the daguerreotype of an Indian prince with whom he had mixed
+blood.
+
+The last of this wild family, the daughter, Henrietta Camilla, became the
+wife of the midshipman Charles, and the mother of the subject of this
+notice, Fleeming Jenkin.  She was a woman of parts and courage.  Not
+beautiful, she had a far higher gift, the art of seeming so; played the
+part of a belle in society, while far lovelier women were left
+unattended; and up to old age had much of both the exigency and the charm
+that mark that character.  She drew naturally, for she had no training,
+with unusual skill; and it was from her, and not from the two naval
+artists, that Fleeming inherited his eye and hand.  She played on the
+harp and sang with something beyond the talent of an amateur.  At the age
+of seventeen, she heard Pasta in Paris; flew up in a fire of youthful
+enthusiasm; and the next morning, all alone and without introduction,
+found her way into the presence of the _prima donna_ and begged for
+lessons.  Pasta made her sing, kissed her when she had done, and though
+she refused to be her mistress, placed her in the hands of a friend.  Nor
+was this all, for when Pasta returned to Paris, she sent for the girl
+(once at least) to test her progress.  But Mrs. Jenkin’s talents were not
+so remarkable as her fortitude and strength of will; and it was in an art
+for which she had no natural taste (the art of literature) that she
+appeared before the public.  Her novels, though they attained and merited
+a certain popularity both in France and England, are a measure only of
+her courage.  They were a task, not a beloved task; they were written for
+money in days of poverty, and they served their end.  In the least thing
+as well as in the greatest, in every province of life as well as in her
+novels, she displayed the same capacity of taking infinite pains, which
+descended to her son.  When she was about forty (as near as her age was
+known) she lost her voice; set herself at once to learn the piano,
+working eight hours a day; and attained to such proficiency that her
+collaboration in chamber music was courted by professionals.  And more
+than twenty years later, the old lady might have been seen dauntlessly
+beginning the study of Hebrew.  This is the more ethereal part of
+courage; nor was she wanting in the more material.  Once when a
+neighbouring groom, a married man, had seduced her maid, Mrs. Jenkin
+mounted her horse, rode over to the stable entrance and horsewhipped the
+man with her own hand.
+
+How a match came about between this talented and spirited girl and the
+young midshipman, is not very I easy to conceive.  Charles Jenkin was one
+of the finest creatures breathing; loyalty, devotion, simple natural
+piety, boyish cheerfulness, tender and manly sentiment in the old sailor
+fashion, were in him inherent and inextinguishable either by age,
+suffering, or injustice.  He looked, as he was, every inch a gentleman;
+he must have been everywhere notable, even among handsome men, both for
+his face and his gallant bearing; not so much that of a sailor, you would
+have said, as like one of those gentle and graceful soldiers that, to
+this day, are the most pleasant of Englishmen to see.  But though he was
+in these ways noble, the dunce scholar of Northiam was to the end no
+genius.  Upon all points that a man must understand to be a gentleman, to
+be upright, gallant, affectionate and dead to self, Captain Jenkin was
+more knowing than one among a thousand; outside of that, his mind was
+very largely blank.  He had indeed a simplicity that came near to
+vacancy; and in the first forty years of his married life, this want grew
+more accentuated.  In both families imprudent marriages had been the
+rule; but neither Jenkin nor Campbell had ever entered into a more
+unequal union.  It was the captain’s good looks, we may suppose, that
+gained for him this elevation; and in some ways and for many years of his
+life, he had to pay the penalty.  His wife, impatient of his incapacity
+and surrounded by brilliant friends, used him with a certain contempt.
+She was the managing partner; the life was hers, not his; after his
+retirement they lived much abroad, where the poor captain, who could
+never learn any language but his own, sat in the corner mumchance; and
+even his son, carried away by his bright mother, did not recognise for
+long the treasures of simple chivalry that lay buried in the heart of his
+father.  Yet it would be an error to regard this marriage as unfortunate.
+It not only lasted long enough to justify itself in a beautiful and
+touching epilogue, but it gave to the world the scientific work and what
+(while time was) were of far greater value, the delightful qualities of
+Fleeming Jenkin.  The Kentish-Welsh family, facile, extravagant, generous
+to a fault and far from brilliant, had given the father, an extreme
+example of its humble virtues.  On the other side, the wild, cruel,
+proud, and somewhat blackguard stock of the Scotch Campbell-Jacksons, had
+put forth, in the person of the mother all its force and courage.
+
+The marriage fell in evil days.  In 1823, the bubble of the Golden Aunt’s
+inheritance had burst.  She died holding the hand of the nephew she had
+so wantonly deceived; at the last she drew him down and seemed to bless
+him, surely with some remorseful feeling; for when the will was opened,
+there was not found so much as the mention of his name.  He was deeply in
+debt; in debt even to the estate of his deceiver, so that he had to sell
+a piece of land to clear himself.  ‘My dear boy,’ he said to Charles,
+‘there will be nothing left for you.  I am a ruined man.’  And here
+follows for me the strangest part of this story.  From the death of the
+treacherous aunt, Charles Jenkin, senior, had still some nine years to
+live; it was perhaps too late for him to turn to saving, and perhaps his
+affairs were past restoration.  But his family at least had all this
+while to prepare; they were still young men, and knew what they had to
+look for at their father’s death; and yet when that happened in
+September, 1831, the heir was still apathetically waiting.  Poor John,
+the days of his whips and spurs, and Yeomanry dinners, were quite over;
+and with that incredible softness of the Jenkin nature, he settled down
+for the rest of a long life, into something not far removed above a
+peasant.  The mill farm at Stowting had been saved out of the wreck; and
+here he built himself a house on the Mexican model, and made the two ends
+meet with rustic thrift, gathering dung with his own hands upon the road
+and not at all abashed at his employment.  In dress, voice, and manner,
+he fell into mere country plainness; lived without the least care for
+appearances, the least regret for the past or discontentment with the
+present; and when he came to die, died with Stoic cheerfulness,
+announcing that he had had a comfortable time and was yet well pleased to
+go.  One would think there was little active virtue to be inherited from
+such a race; and yet in this same voluntary peasant, the special gift of
+Fleeming Jenkin was already half developed.  The old man to the end was
+perpetually inventing; his strange, ill-spelled, unpunctuated
+correspondence is full (when he does not drop into cookery receipts) of
+pumps, road engines, steam-diggers, steam-ploughs, and steam-threshing
+machines; and I have it on Fleeming’s word that what he did was full of
+ingenuity—only, as if by some cross destiny, useless.  These
+disappointments he not only took with imperturbable good humour, but
+rejoiced with a particular relish over his nephew’s success in the same
+field.  ‘I glory in the professor,’ he wrote to his brother; and to
+Fleeming himself, with a touch of simple drollery, ‘I was much pleased
+with your lecture, but why did you hit me so hard with Conisure’s’
+(connoisseur’s, _quasi_ amateur’s) ‘engineering?  Oh, what
+presumption!—either of you or _my_self!’  A quaint, pathetic figure, this
+of uncle John, with his dung cart and his inventions; and the romantic
+fancy of his Mexican house; and his craze about the Lost Tribes which
+seemed to the worthy man the key of all perplexities; and his quiet
+conscience, looking back on a life not altogether vain, for he was a good
+son to his father while his father lived, and when evil days approached,
+he had proved himself a cheerful Stoic.
+
+It followed from John’s inertia, that the duty of winding up the estate
+fell into the hands of Charles.  He managed it with no more skill than
+might be expected of a sailor ashore, saved a bare livelihood for John
+and nothing for the rest.  Eight months later, he married Miss Jackson;
+and with her money, bought in some two-thirds of Stowting.  In the
+beginning of the little family history which I have been following to so
+great an extent, the Captain mentions, with a delightful pride: ‘A Court
+Baron and Court Leet are regularly held by the Lady of the Manor, Mrs.
+Henrietta Camilla Jenkin’; and indeed the pleasure of so describing his
+wife, was the most solid benefit of the investment; for the purchase was
+heavily encumbered and paid them nothing till some years before their
+death.  In the meanwhile, the Jackson family also, what with wild sons,
+an indulgent mother and the impending emancipation of the slaves, was
+moving nearer and nearer to beggary; and thus of two doomed and declining
+houses, the subject of this memoir was born, heir to an estate and to no
+money, yet with inherited qualities that were to make him known and
+loved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.  1833–1851.
+
+
+Birth and Childhood—Edinburgh—Frankfort-on-the-Main—Paris—The Revolution
+of 1848—The Insurrection—Flight to Italy—Sympathy with Italy—The
+Insurrection in Genoa—A Student in Genoa—The Lad and his Mother.
+
+HENRY CHARLES FLEEMING JENKIN (Fleeming, pronounced Flemming, to his
+friends and family) was born in a Government building on the coast of
+Kent, near Dungeness, where his father was serving at the time in the
+Coastguard, on March 25, 1833, and named after Admiral Fleeming, one of
+his father’s protectors in the navy.
+
+His childhood was vagrant like his life.  Once he was left in the care of
+his grandmother Jackson, while Mrs. Jenkin sailed in her husband’s ship
+and stayed a year at the Havannah.  The tragic woman was besides from
+time to time a member of the family she was in distress of mind and
+reduced in fortune by the misconduct of her sons; her destitution and
+solitude made it a recurring duty to receive her, her violence
+continually enforced fresh separations.  In her passion of a disappointed
+mother, she was a fit object of pity; but her grandson, who heard her
+load his own mother with cruel insults and reproaches, conceived for her
+an indignant and impatient hatred, for which he blamed himself in later
+life.  It is strange from this point of view to see his childish letters
+to Mrs. Jackson; and to think that a man, distinguished above all by
+stubborn truthfulness, should have been brought up to such dissimulation.
+But this is of course unavoidable in life; it did no harm to Jenkin; and
+whether he got harm or benefit from a so early acquaintance with violent
+and hateful scenes, is more than I can guess.  The experience, at least,
+was formative; and in judging his character it should not be forgotten.
+But Mrs. Jackson was not the only stranger in their gates; the Captain’s
+sister, Aunt Anna Jenkin, lived with them until her death; she had all
+the Jenkin beauty of countenance, though she was unhappily deformed in
+body and of frail health; and she even excelled her gentle and
+ineffectual family in all amiable qualities.  So that each of the two
+races from which Fleeming sprang, had an outpost by his very cradle; the
+one he instinctively loved, the other hated; and the life-long war in his
+members had begun thus early by a victory for what was best.
+
+We can trace the family from one country place to another in the south of
+Scotland; where the child learned his taste for sport by riding home the
+pony from the moors.  Before he was nine he could write such a passage as
+this about a Hallowe’en observance: ‘I pulled a middling-sized
+cabbage-runt with a pretty sum of gold about it.  No witches would run
+after me when I was sowing my hempseed this year; my nuts blazed away
+together very comfortably to the end of their lives, and when mamma put
+hers in which were meant for herself and papa they blazed away in the
+like manner.’  Before he was ten he could write, with a really irritating
+precocity, that he had been ‘making some pictures from a book called “Les
+Français peints par euxmêmes.” . . .  It is full of pictures of all
+classes, with a description of each in French.  The pictures are a little
+caricatured, but not much.’  Doubtless this was only an echo from his
+mother, but it shows the atmosphere in which he breathed.  It must have
+been a good change for this art critic to be the playmate of Mary
+Macdonald, their gardener’s daughter at Barjarg, and to sup with her
+family on potatoes and milk; and Fleeming himself attached some value to
+this early and friendly experience of another class.
+
+His education, in the formal sense, began at Jedburgh.  Thence he went to
+the Edinburgh Academy, where he was the classmate of Tait and Clerk
+Maxwell, bore away many prizes, and was once unjustly flogged by Rector
+Williams.  He used to insist that all his bad schoolfellows had died
+early, a belief amusingly characteristic of the man’s consistent
+optimism.  In 1846 the mother and son proceeded to Frankfort-on-the-Main,
+where they were soon joined by the father, now reduced to inaction and to
+play something like third fiddle in his narrow household.  The
+emancipation of the slaves had deprived them of their last resource
+beyond the half-pay of a captain; and life abroad was not only desirable
+for the sake of Fleeming’s education, it was almost enforced by reasons
+of economy.  But it was, no doubt, somewhat hard upon the captain.
+Certainly that perennial boy found a companion in his son; they were both
+active and eager, both willing to be amused, both young, if not in years,
+then in character.  They went out together on excursions and sketched old
+castles, sitting side by side; they had an angry rivalry in walking,
+doubtless equally sincere upon both sides; and indeed we may say that
+Fleeming was exceptionally favoured, and that no boy had ever a companion
+more innocent, engaging, gay, and airy.  But although in this case it
+would be easy to exaggerate its import, yet, in the Jenkin family also,
+the tragedy of the generations was proceeding, and the child was growing
+out of his father’s knowledge.  His artistic aptitude was of a different
+order.  Already he had his quick sight of many sides of life; he already
+overflowed with distinctions and generalisations, contrasting the
+dramatic art and national character of England, Germany, Italy, and
+France.  If he were dull, he would write stories and poems.  ‘I have
+written,’ he says at thirteen, ‘a very long story in heroic measure, 300
+lines, and another Scotch story and innumerable bits of poetry’; and at
+the same age he had not only a keen feeling for scenery, but could do
+something with his pen to call it up.  I feel I do always less than
+justice to the delightful memory of Captain Jenkin; but with a lad of
+this character, cutting the teeth of his intelligence, he was sure to
+fall into the background.
+
+The family removed in 1847 to Paris, where Fleeming was put to school
+under one Deluc.  There he learned French, and (if the captain is right)
+first began to show a taste for mathematics.  But a far more important
+teacher than Deluc was at hand; the year 1848, so momentous for Europe,
+was momentous also for Fleeming’s character.  The family politics were
+Liberal; Mrs. Jenkin, generous before all things, was sure to be upon the
+side of exiles; and in the house of a Paris friend of hers, Mrs.
+Turner—already known to fame as Shelley’s Cornelia de Boinville—Fleeming
+saw and heard such men as Manin, Gioberti, and the Ruffinis.  He was thus
+prepared to sympathise with revolution; and when the hour came, and he
+found himself in the midst of stirring and influential events, the lad’s
+whole character was moved.  He corresponded at that time with a young
+Edinburgh friend, one Frank Scott; and I am here going to draw somewhat
+largely on this boyish correspondence.  It gives us at once a picture of
+the Revolution and a portrait of Jenkin at fifteen; not so different (his
+friends will think) from the Jenkin of the end—boyish, simple,
+opinionated, delighting in action, delighting before all things in any
+generous sentiment.
+
+                                                       ‘February 23, 1848.
+
+    ‘When at 7 o’clock to-day I went out, I met a large band going round
+    the streets, calling on the inhabitants to illuminate their houses,
+    and bearing torches.  This was all very good fun, and everybody was
+    delighted; but as they stopped rather long and were rather turbulent
+    in the Place de la Madeleine, near where we live’ [in the Rue
+    Caumartin] ‘a squadron of dragoons came up, formed, and charged at a
+    hand-gallop.  This was a very pretty sight; the crowd was not too
+    thick, so they easily got away; and the dragoons only gave blows with
+    the back of the sword, which hurt but did not wound.  I was as close
+    to them as I am now to the other side of the table; it was rather
+    impressive, however.  At the second charge they rode on the pavement
+    and knocked the torches out of the fellows’ hands; rather a shame,
+    too—wouldn’t be stood in England. . . .
+
+    [At] ‘ten minutes to ten . . . I went a long way along the
+    Boulevards, passing by the office of Foreign Affairs, where Guizot
+    lives, and where to-night there were about a thousand troops
+    protecting him from the fury of the populace.  After this was passed,
+    the number of the people thickened, till about half a mile further
+    on, I met a troop of vagabonds, the wildest vagabonds in the
+    world—Paris vagabonds, well armed, having probably broken into
+    gunsmiths’ shops and taken the guns and swords.  They were about a
+    hundred.  These were followed by about a thousand (I am rather
+    diminishing than exaggerating numbers all through), indifferently
+    armed with rusty sabres, sticks, etc.  An uncountable troop of
+    gentlemen, workmen, shopkeepers’ wives (Paris women dare anything),
+    ladies’ maids, common women—in fact, a crowd of all classes, though
+    by far the greater number were of the better dressed class—followed.
+    Indeed, it was a splendid sight: the mob in front chanting the
+    “_Marseillaise_,” the national war hymn, grave and powerful,
+    sweetened by the night air—though night in these splendid streets was
+    turned into day, every window was filled with lamps, dim torches were
+    tossing in the crowd . . . for Guizot has late this night given in
+    his resignation, and this was an improvised illumination.
+
+    ‘I and my father had turned with the crowd, and were close behind the
+    second troop of vagabonds.  Joy was on every face.  I remarked to
+    papa that “I would not have missed the scene for anything, I might
+    never see such a splendid one,” when _plong_ went one shot—every face
+    went pale—_r-r-r-r-r_ went the whole detachment, [and] the whole
+    crowd of gentlemen and ladies turned and cut.  Such a scene!—ladies,
+    gentlemen, and vagabonds went sprawling in the mud, not shot but
+    tripped up; and those that went down could not rise, they were
+    trampled over. . . . I ran a short time straight on and did not fall,
+    then turned down a side street, ran fifty yards and felt tolerably
+    safe; looked for papa, did not see him; so walked on quickly, giving
+    the news as I went.’  [It appears, from another letter, the boy was
+    the first to carry word of the firing to the Rue St. Honoré; and that
+    his news wherever he brought it was received with hurrahs.  It was an
+    odd entrance upon life for a little English lad, thus to play the
+    part of rumour in such a crisis of the history of France.]
+
+    ‘But now a new fear came over me.  I had little doubt but my papa was
+    safe, but my fear was that he should arrive at home before me and
+    tell the story; in that case I knew my mamma would go half mad with
+    fright, so on I went as quick as possible.  I heard no more
+    discharges.  When I got half way home, I found my way blocked up by
+    troops.  That way or the Boulevards I must pass.  In the Boulevards
+    they were fighting, and I was afraid all other passages might be
+    blocked up . . . and I should have to sleep in a hotel in that case,
+    and then my mamma—however, after a long _détour_, I found a passage
+    and ran home, and in our street joined papa.
+
+    ‘. . . I’ll tell you to-morrow the other facts gathered from
+    newspapers and papa. . . . Tonight I have given you what I have seen
+    with my own eyes an hour ago, and began trembling with excitement and
+    fear.  If I have been too long on this one subject, it is because it
+    is yet before my eyes.
+
+                                                              ‘Monday, 24.
+
+    ‘It was that fire raised the people.  There was fighting all through
+    the night in the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, on the Boulevards where
+    they had been shot at, and at the Porte St. Denis.  At ten o’clock,
+    they resigned the house of the Minister of Foreign Affairs (where the
+    disastrous volley was fired) to the people, who immediately took
+    possession of it.  I went to school, but [was] hardly there when the
+    row in that quarter commenced.  Barricades began to be fixed.
+    Everyone was very grave now; the _externes_ went away, but no one
+    came to fetch me, so I had to stay.  No lessons could go on.  A troop
+    of armed men took possession of the barricades, so it was supposed I
+    should have to sleep there.  The revolters came and asked for arms,
+    but Deluc (head-master) is a National Guard, and he said he had only
+    his own and he wanted them; but he said he would not fire on them.
+    Then they asked for wine, which he gave them.  They took good care
+    not to get drunk, knowing they would not be able to fight.  They were
+    very polite and behaved extremely well.
+
+    ‘About 12 o’clock a servant came for a boy who lived near me, [and]
+    Deluc thought it best to send me with him.  We heard a good deal of
+    firing near, but did not come across any of the parties.  As we
+    approached the railway, the barricades were no longer formed of
+    palings, planks, or stones; but they had got all the omnibuses as
+    they passed, sent the horses and passengers about their business, and
+    turned them over.  A double row of overturned coaches made a capital
+    barricade, with a few paving stones.
+
+    ‘When I got home I found to my astonishment that in our fighting
+    quarter it was much quieter.  Mamma had just been out seeing the
+    troops in the Place de la Concorde, when suddenly the Municipal
+    Guard, now fairly exasperated, prevented the National Guard from
+    proceeding, and fired at them; the National Guard had come with their
+    muskets not loaded, but at length returned the fire.  Mamma saw the
+    National Guard fire.  The Municipal Guard were round the corner.  She
+    was delighted for she saw no person killed, though many of the
+    Municipals were. . . . .
+
+    ‘I immediately went out with my papa (mamma had just come back with
+    him) and went to the Place de la Concorde.  There was an enormous
+    quantity of troops in the Place.  Suddenly the gates of the gardens
+    of the Tuileries opened: we rushed forward, out gallopped an enormous
+    number of cuirassiers, in the middle of which were a couple of low
+    carriages, said first to contain the Count de Paris and the Duchess
+    of Orleans, but afterwards they said it was the King and Queen; and
+    then I heard he had abdicated.  I returned and gave the news.
+
+    ‘Went out again up the Boulevards.  The house of the Minister of
+    Foreign Affairs was filled with people and “_Hôtel du Peuple_”
+    written on it; the Boulevards were barricaded with fine old trees
+    that were cut down and stretched all across the road.  We went
+    through a great many little streets, all strongly barricaded, and
+    sentinels of the people at the principal of them.  The streets were
+    very unquiet, filled with armed men and women, for the troops had
+    followed the ex-King to Neuilly and left Paris in the power of the
+    people.  We met the captain of the Third Legion of the National Guard
+    (who had principally protected the people), badly wounded by a
+    Municipal Guard, stretched on a litter.  He was in possession of his
+    senses.  He was surrounded by a troop of men crying “Our brave
+    captain—we have him yet—he’s not dead!  _Vive la Réforme_!”  This cry
+    was responded to by all, and every one saluted him as he passed.  I
+    do not know if he was mortally wounded.  That Third Legion has
+    behaved splendidly.
+
+    ‘I then returned, and shortly afterwards went out again to the garden
+    of the Tuileries.  They were given up to the people and the palace
+    was being sacked.  The people were firing blank cartridges to testify
+    their joy, and they had a cannon on the top of the palace.  It was a
+    sight to see a palace sacked and armed vagabonds firing out of the
+    windows, and throwing shirts, papers, and dresses of all kinds out of
+    the windows.  They are not rogues, these French; they are not
+    stealing, burning, or doing much harm.  In the Tuileries they have
+    dressed up some of the statues, broken some, and stolen nothing but
+    queer dresses.  I say, Frank, you must not hate the French; hate the
+    Germans if you like.  The French laugh at us a little, and call out
+    _Goddam_ in the streets; but to-day, in civil war, when they might
+    have put a bullet through our heads, I never was insulted once.
+
+    ‘At present we have a provisional Government, consisting of Odion
+    [_sic_] Barrot, Lamartine, Marast, and some others; among them a
+    common workman, but very intelligent.  This is a triumph of
+    liberty—rather!
+
+    ‘Now then, Frank, what do you think of it?  I in a revolution and out
+    all day.  Just think, what fun!  So it was at first, till I was fired
+    at yesterday; but to-day I was not frightened, but it turned me sick
+    at heart, I don’t know why.  There has been no great bloodshed,
+    [though] I certainly have seen men’s blood several times.  But
+    there’s something shocking to see a whole armed populace, though not
+    furious, for not one single shop has been broken open, except the
+    gunsmiths’ shops, and most of the arms will probably be taken back
+    again.  For the French have no cupidity in their nature; they don’t
+    like to steal—it is not in their nature.  I shall send this letter in
+    a day or two, when I am sure the post will go again.  I know I have
+    been a long time writing, but I hope you will find the matter of this
+    letter interesting, as coming from a person resident on the spot;
+    though probably you don’t take much interest in the French, but I can
+    think, write, and speak on no other subject.
+
+                                                                 ‘Feb. 25.
+
+    ‘There is no more fighting, the people have conquered; but the
+    barricades are still kept up, and the people are in arms, more than
+    ever fearing some new act of treachery on the part of the ex-King.
+    The fight where I was was the principal cause of the Revolution.  I
+    was in little danger from the shot, for there was an immense crowd in
+    front of me, though quite within gunshot.  [By another letter, a
+    hundred yards from the troops.]  I wished I had stopped there.
+
+    ‘The Paris streets are filled with the most extraordinary crowds of
+    men, women and children, ladies and gentlemen.  Every person joyful.
+    The bands of armed men are perfectly polite.  Mamma and aunt to-day
+    walked through armed crowds alone, that were firing blank cartridges
+    in all directions.  Every person made way with the greatest
+    politeness, and one common man with a blouse, coming by accident
+    against her immediately stopped to beg her pardon in the politest
+    manner.  There are few drunken men.  The Tuileries is still being run
+    over by the people; they only broke two things, a bust of Louis
+    Philippe and one of Marshal Bugeaud, who fired on the people. . . . .
+
+    ‘I have been out all day again to-day, and precious tired I am.  The
+    Republican party seem the strongest, and are going about with red
+    ribbons in their button-holes. . . . .
+
+    ‘The title of “Mister” is abandoned; they say nothing but “Citizen,”
+    and the people are shaking hands amazingly.  They have got to the top
+    of the public monuments, and, mingling with bronze or stone statues,
+    five or six make a sort of _tableau vivant_, the top man holding up
+    the red flag of the Republic; and right well they do it, and very
+    picturesque they look.  I think I shall put this letter in the post
+    to-morrow as we got a letter to-night.
+
+                                                            (On Envelope.)
+
+    ‘M. Lamartine has now by his eloquence conquered the whole armed
+    crowd of citizens threatening to kill him if he did not immediately
+    proclaim the Republic and red flag.  He said he could not yield to
+    the citizens of Paris alone, that the whole country must be
+    consulted; that he chose the tricolour, for it had followed and
+    accompanied the triumphs of France all over the world, and that the
+    red flag had only been dipped in the blood of the citizens.  For
+    sixty hours he has been quieting the people: he is at the head of
+    everything.  Don’t be prejudiced, Frank, by what you see in the
+    papers.  The French have acted nobly, splendidly; there has been no
+    brutality, plundering, or stealing. . . .  I did not like the French
+    before; but in this respect they are the finest people in the world.
+    I am so glad to have been here.’
+
+And there one could wish to stop with this apotheosis of liberty and
+order read with the generous enthusiasm of a boy; but as the reader
+knows, it was but the first act of the piece.  The letters, vivid as they
+are, written as they were by a hand trembling with fear and excitement,
+yet do injustice, in their boyishness of tone, to the profound effect
+produced.  At the sound of these songs and shot of cannon, the boy’s mind
+awoke.  He dated his own appreciation of the art of acting from the day
+when he saw and heard Rachel recite the ‘_Marseillaise_’ at the Français,
+the tricolour in her arms.  What is still more strange, he had been up to
+then invincibly indifferent to music, insomuch that he could not
+distinguish ‘God save the Queen’ from ‘Bonnie Dundee’; and now, to the
+chanting of the mob, he amazed his family by learning and singing
+‘_Mourir pour la Patrie_.’  But the letters, though they prepare the mind
+for no such revolution in the boy’s tastes and feelings, are yet full of
+entertaining traits.  Let the reader note Fleeming’s eagerness to
+influence his friend Frank, an incipient Tory (no less) as further
+history displayed; his unconscious indifference to his father and
+devotion to his mother, betrayed in so many significant expressions and
+omissions; the sense of dignity of this diminutive ‘person resident on
+the spot,’ who was so happy as to escape insult; and the strange picture
+of the household—father, mother, son, and even poor Aunt Anna—all day in
+the streets in the thick of this rough business, and the boy packed off
+alone to school in a distant quarter on the very morrow of the massacre.
+
+They had all the gift of enjoying life’s texture as it comes; they were
+all born optimists.  The name of liberty was honoured in that family, its
+spirit also, but within stringent limits; and some of the foreign friends
+of Mrs. Jenkin were, as I have said, men distinguished on the Liberal
+side.  Like Wordsworth, they beheld
+
+    France standing on the top of golden hours
+    And human nature seeming born again.
+
+At once, by temper and belief, they were formed to find their element in
+such a decent and whiggish convulsion, spectacular in its course,
+moderate in its purpose.  For them,
+
+    Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
+    But to be young was very heaven.
+
+And I cannot but smile when I think that (again like Wordsworth) they
+should have so specially disliked the consequence.
+
+It came upon them by surprise.  Liberal friends of the precise right
+shade of colour had assured them, in Mrs. Turner’s drawing-room, that all
+was for the best; and they rose on January 23 without fear.  About the
+middle of the day they heard the sound of musketry, and the next morning
+they were wakened by the cannonade.  The French who had behaved so
+‘splendidly,’ pausing, at the voice of Lamartine, just where judicious
+Liberals could have desired—the French, who had ‘no cupidity in their
+nature,’ were now about to play a variation on the theme rebellion.  The
+Jenkins took refuge in the house of Mrs. Turner, the house of the false
+prophets, ‘Anna going with Mrs. Turner, that she might be prevented
+speaking English, Fleeming, Miss H. and I (it is the mother who writes)
+walking together.  As we reached the Rue de Clichy, the report of the
+cannon sounded close to our ears and made our hearts sick, I assure you.
+The fighting was at the barrier Rochechouart, a few streets off.  All
+Saturday and Sunday we were a prey to great alarm, there came so many
+reports that the insurgents were getting the upper hand.  One could tell
+the state of affairs from the extreme quiet or the sudden hum in the
+street.  When the news was bad, all the houses closed and the people
+disappeared; when better, the doors half opened and you heard the sound
+of men again.  From the upper windows we could see each discharge from
+the Bastille—I mean the smoke rising—and also the flames and smoke from
+the Boulevard la Chapelle.  We were four ladies, and only Fleeming by way
+of a man, and difficulty enough we had to keep him from joining the
+National Guards—his pride and spirit were both fired.  You cannot picture
+to yourself the multitudes of soldiers, guards, and armed men of all
+sorts we watched—not close to the window, however, for such havoc had
+been made among them by the firing from the windows, that as the
+battalions marched by, they cried, “Fermez vos fenêtres!” and it was very
+painful to watch their looks of anxiety and suspicion as they marched
+by.’
+
+‘The Revolution,’ writes Fleeming to Frank Scott, ‘was quite delightful:
+getting popped at and run at by horses, and giving sous for the wounded
+into little boxes guarded by the raggedest, picturesquest,
+delightfullest, sentinels; but the insurrection! ugh, I shudder to think
+at [_sic_] it.’  He found it ‘not a bit of fun sitting boxed up in the
+house four days almost. . . I was the only _gentleman_ to four ladies,
+and didn’t they keep me in order!  I did not dare to show my face at a
+window, for fear of catching a stray ball or being forced to enter the
+National Guard; [for] they would have it I was a man full-grown, French,
+and every way fit to fight.  And my mamma was as bad as any of them; she
+that told me I was a coward last time if I stayed in the house a quarter
+of an hour!  But I drew, examined the pistols, of which I found lots with
+caps, powder, and ball, while sometimes murderous intentions of killing a
+dozen insurgents and dying violently overpowered by numbers. . . . .’  We
+may drop this sentence here: under the conduct of its boyish writer, it
+was to reach no legitimate end.
+
+Four days of such a discipline had cured the family of Paris; the same
+year Fleeming was to write, in answer apparently to a question of Frank
+Scott’s, ‘I could find no national game in France but revolutions’; and
+the witticism was justified in their experience.  On the first possible
+day, they applied for passports, and were advised to take the road to
+Geneva.  It appears it was scarce safe to leave Paris for England.
+Charles Reade, with keen dramatic gusto, had just smuggled himself out of
+that city in the bottom of a cab.  English gold had been found on the
+insurgents, the name of England was in evil odour; and it was thus—for
+strategic reasons, so to speak—that Fleeming found himself on the way to
+that Italy where he was to complete his education, and for which he
+cherished to the end a special kindness.
+
+It was in Genoa they settled; partly for the sake of the captain, who
+might there find naval comrades; partly because of the Ruffinis, who had
+been friends of Mrs. Jenkin in their time of exile and were now
+considerable men at home; partly, in fine, with hopes that Fleeming might
+attend the University; in preparation for which he was put at once to
+school.  It was the year of Novara; Mazzini was in Rome; the dry bones of
+Italy were moving; and for people of alert and liberal sympathies the
+time was inspiriting.  What with exiles turned Ministers of State,
+universities thrown open to Protestants, Fleeming himself the first
+Protestant student in Genoa, and thus, as his mother writes, ‘a living
+instance of the progress of liberal ideas’—it was little wonder if the
+enthusiastic young woman and the clever boy were heart and soul upon the
+side of Italy.  It should not be forgotten that they were both on their
+first visit to that country; the mother still child enough ‘to be
+delighted when she saw real monks’; and both mother and son thrilling
+with the first sight of snowy Alps, the blue Mediterranean, and the
+crowded port and the palaces of Genoa.  Nor was their zeal without
+knowledge.  Ruffini, deputy for Genoa and soon to be head of the
+University, was at their side; and by means of him the family appear to
+have had access to much Italian society.  To the end, Fleeming professed
+his admiration of the Piedmontese and his unalterable confidence in the
+future of Italy under their conduct; for Victor Emanuel, Cavour, the
+first La Marmora and Garibaldi, he had varying degrees of sympathy and
+praise: perhaps highest for the King, whose good sense and temper filled
+him with respect—perhaps least for Garibaldi, whom he loved but yet
+mistrusted.
+
+But this is to look forward: these were the days not of Victor Emanuel
+but of Charles Albert; and it was on Charles Albert that mother and son
+had now fixed their eyes as on the sword-bearer of Italy.  On Fleeming’s
+sixteenth birthday, they were, the mother writes, ‘in great anxiety for
+news from the army.  You can have no idea what it is to live in a country
+where such a struggle is going on.  The interest is one that absorbs all
+others.  We eat, drink, and sleep to the noise of drums and musketry.
+You would enjoy and almost admire Fleeming’s enthusiasm and
+earnestness—and, courage, I may say—for we are among the small minority
+of English who side with the Italians.  The other day, at dinner at the
+Consul’s, boy as he is, and in spite of my admonitions, Fleeming defended
+the Italian cause, and so well that he “tripped up the heels of his
+adversary” simply from being well-informed on the subject and honest.  He
+is as true as steel, and for no one will he bend right or left. . . . .
+Do not fancy him a Bobadil,’ she adds, ‘he is only a very true, candid
+boy.  I am so glad he remains in all respects but information a great
+child.’
+
+If this letter is correctly dated, the cause was already lost and the
+King had already abdicated when these lines were written.  No sooner did
+the news reach Genoa, than there began ‘tumultuous movements’; and the
+Jenkins’ received hints it would be wise to leave the city.  But they had
+friends and interests; even the captain had English officers to keep him
+company, for Lord Hardwicke’s ship, the _Vengeance_, lay in port; and
+supposing the danger to be real, I cannot but suspect the whole family of
+a divided purpose, prudence being possibly weaker than curiosity.  Stay,
+at least, they did, and thus rounded their experience of the
+revolutionary year.  On Sunday, April 1, Fleeming and the captain went
+for a ramble beyond the walls, leaving Aunt Anna and Mrs. Jenkin to walk
+on the bastions with some friends.  On the way back, this party turned
+aside to rest in the Church of the Madonna delle Grazie.  ‘We had
+remarked,’ writes Mrs. Jenkin, ‘the entire absence of sentinels on the
+ramparts, and how the cannons were left in solitary state; and I had just
+remarked “How quiet everything is!” when suddenly we heard the drums
+begin to beat and distant shouts.  _Accustomed as we are_ to revolutions,
+we never thought of being frightened.’  For all that, they resumed their
+return home.  On the way they saw men running and vociferating, but
+nothing to indicate a general disturbance, until, near the Duke’s palace,
+they came upon and passed a shouting mob dragging along with it three
+cannon.  It had scarcely passed before they heard ‘a rushing sound’; one
+of the gentlemen thrust back the party of ladies under a shed, and the
+mob passed again.  A fine-looking young man was in their hands; and Mrs.
+Jenkin saw him with his mouth open as if he sought to speak, saw him
+tossed from one to another like a ball, and then saw him no more.  ‘He
+was dead a few instants after, but the crowd hid that terror from us.  My
+knees shook under me and my sight left me.’  With this street tragedy,
+the curtain rose upon their second revolution.
+
+The attack on Spirito Santo, and the capitulation and departure of the
+troops speedily followed.  Genoa was in the hands of the Republicans, and
+now came a time when the English residents were in a position to pay some
+return for hospitality received.  Nor were they backward.  Our Consul
+(the same who had the benefit of correction from Fleeming) carried the
+Intendente on board the _Vengeance_, escorting him through the streets,
+getting along with him on board a shore boat, and when the insurgents
+levelled their muskets, standing up and naming himself, ‘_Console
+Inglese_.’  A friend of the Jenkins’, Captain Glynne, had a more painful,
+if a less dramatic part.  One Colonel Nosozzo had been killed (I read)
+while trying to prevent his own artillery from firing on the mob; but in
+that hell’s cauldron of a distracted city, there were no distinctions
+made, and the Colonel’s widow was hunted for her life.  In her grief and
+peril, the Glynnes received and hid her; Captain Glynne sought and found
+her husband’s body among the slain, saved it for two days, brought the
+widow a lock of the dead man’s hair; but at last, the mob still strictly
+searching, seems to have abandoned the body, and conveyed his guest on
+board the _Vengeance_.  The Jenkins also had their refugees, the family
+of an _employé_ threatened by a decree.  ‘You should have seen me making
+a Union Jack to nail over our door,’ writes Mrs. Jenkin.  ‘I never worked
+so fast in my life.  Monday and Tuesday,’ she continues, ‘were tolerably
+quiet, our hearts beating fast in the hope of La Marmora’s approach, the
+streets barricaded, and none but foreigners and women allowed to leave
+the city.’  On Wednesday, La Marmora came indeed, but in the ugly form of
+a bombardment; and that evening the Jenkins sat without lights about
+their drawing-room window, ‘watching the huge red flashes of the cannon’
+from the Brigato and La Specula forts, and hearkening, not without some
+awful pleasure, to the thunder of the cannonade.
+
+Lord Hardwicke intervened between the rebels and La Marmora; and there
+followed a troubled armistice, filled with the voice of panic.  Now the
+_Vengeance_ was known to be cleared for action; now it was rumoured that
+the galley slaves were to be let loose upon the town, and now that the
+troops would enter it by storm.  Crowds, trusting in the Union Jack over
+the Jenkins’ door, came to beg them to receive their linen and other
+valuables; nor could their instances be refused; and in the midst of all
+this bustle and alarm, piles of goods must be examined and long
+inventories made.  At last the captain decided things had gone too far.
+He himself apparently remained to watch over the linen; but at five
+o’clock on the Sunday morning, Aunt Anna, Fleeming, and his mother were
+rowed in a pour of rain on board an English merchantman, to suffer ‘nine
+mortal hours of agonising suspense.’  With the end of that time, peace
+was restored.  On Tuesday morning officers with white flags appeared on
+the bastions; then, regiment by regiment, the troops marched in, two
+hundred men sleeping on the ground floor of the Jenkins’ house, thirty
+thousand in all entering the city, but without disturbance, old La
+Marmora being a commander of a Roman sternness.
+
+With the return of quiet, and the reopening of the universities, we
+behold a new character, Signor Flaminio: the professors, it appears, made
+no attempt upon the Jenkin; and thus readily italianised the Fleeming.
+He came well recommended; for their friend Ruffini was then, or soon
+after, raised to be the head of the University; and the professors were
+very kind and attentive, possibly to Ruffini’s _protégé_, perhaps also to
+the first Protestant student.  It was no joke for Signor Flaminio at
+first; certificates had to be got from Paris and from Rector Williams;
+the classics must be furbished up at home that he might follow Latin
+lectures; examinations bristled in the path, the entrance examination
+with Latin and English essay, and oral trials (much softened for the
+foreigner) in Horace, Tacitus, and Cicero, and the first University
+examination only three months later, in Italian eloquence, no less, and
+other wider subjects.  On one point the first Protestant student was
+moved to thank his stars: that there was no Greek required for the
+degree.  Little did he think, as he set down his gratitude, how much, in
+later life and among cribs and dictionaries, he was to lament this
+circumstance; nor how much of that later life he was to spend acquiring,
+with infinite toil, a shadow of what he might then have got with ease and
+fully.  But if his Genoese education was in this particular imperfect, he
+was fortunate in the branches that more immediately touched on his
+career.  The physical laboratory was the best mounted in Italy.
+Bancalari, the professor of natural philosophy, was famous in his day; by
+what seems even an odd coincidence, he went deeply into electromagnetism;
+and it was principally in that subject that Signor Flaminio, questioned
+in Latin and answering in Italian, passed his Master of Arts degree with
+first-class honours.  That he had secured the notice of his teachers, one
+circumstance sufficiently proves.  A philosophical society was started
+under the presidency of Mamiani, ‘one of the examiners and one of the
+leaders of the Moderate party’; and out of five promising students
+brought forward by the professors to attend the sittings and present
+essays, Signor Flaminio was one.  I cannot find that he ever read an
+essay; and indeed I think his hands were otherwise too full.  He found
+his fellow-students ‘not such a bad set of chaps,’ and preferred the
+Piedmontese before the Genoese; but I suspect he mixed not very freely
+with either.  Not only were his days filled with university work, but his
+spare hours were fully dedicated to the arts under the eye of a beloved
+task-mistress.  He worked hard and well in the art school, where he
+obtained a silver medal ‘for a couple of legs the size of life drawn from
+one of Raphael’s cartoons.’  His holidays were spent in sketching; his
+evenings, when they were free, at the theatre.  Here at the opera he
+discovered besides a taste for a new art, the art of music; and it was,
+he wrote, ‘as if he had found out a heaven on earth.’  ‘I am so anxious
+that whatever he professes to know, he should really perfectly possess,’
+his mother wrote, ‘that I spare no pains’; neither to him nor to myself,
+she might have added.  And so when he begged to be allowed to learn the
+piano, she started him with characteristic barbarity on the scales; and
+heard in consequence ‘heart-rending groans’ and saw ‘anguished claspings
+of hands’ as he lost his way among their arid intricacies.
+
+In this picture of the lad at the piano, there is something, for the
+period, girlish.  He was indeed his mother’s boy; and it was fortunate
+his mother was not altogether feminine.  She gave her son a womanly
+delicacy in morals, to a man’s taste—to his own taste in later life—too
+finely spun, and perhaps more elegant than healthful.  She encouraged him
+besides in drawing-room interests.  But in other points her influence was
+manlike.  Filled with the spirit of thoroughness, she taught him to make
+of the least of these accomplishments a virile task; and the teaching
+lasted him through life.  Immersed as she was in the day’s movements and
+buzzed about by leading Liberals, she handed on to him her creed in
+politics: an enduring kindness for Italy, and a loyalty, like that of
+many clever women, to the Liberal party with but small regard to men or
+measures.  This attitude of mind used often to disappoint me in a man so
+fond of logic; but I see now how it was learned from the bright eyes of
+his mother and to the sound of the cannonades of 1848.  To some of her
+defects, besides, she made him heir.  Kind as was the bond that united
+her to her son, kind and even pretty, she was scarce a woman to adorn a
+home; loving as she did to shine; careless as she was of domestic,
+studious of public graces.  She probably rejoiced to see the boy grow up
+in somewhat of the image of herself, generous, excessive, enthusiastic,
+external; catching at ideas, brandishing them when caught; fiery for the
+right, but always fiery; ready at fifteen to correct a consul, ready at
+fifty to explain to any artist his own art.
+
+The defects and advantages of such a training were obvious in Fleeming
+throughout life.  His thoroughness was not that of the patient scholar,
+but of an untrained woman with fits of passionate study; he had learned
+too much from dogma, given indeed by cherished lips; and precocious as he
+was in the use of the tools of the mind, he was truly backward in
+knowledge of life and of himself.  Such as it was at least, his home and
+school training was now complete; and you are to conceive the lad as
+being formed in a household of meagre revenue, among foreign
+surroundings, and under the influence of an imperious drawing-room queen;
+from whom he learned a great refinement of morals, a strong sense of
+duty, much forwardness of bearing, all manner of studious and artistic
+interests, and many ready-made opinions which he embraced with a son’s
+and a disciple’s loyalty.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.  1851–1858.
+
+
+Return to England—Fleeming at Fairbairn’s—Experience in a Strike—Dr. Bell
+and Greek Architecture—The Gaskells—Fleeming at Greenwich—The
+Austins—Fleeming and the Austins—His Engagement—Fleeming and Sir W.
+Thomson.
+
+IN 1851, the year of Aunt Anna’s death, the family left Genoa and came to
+Manchester, where Fleeming was entered in Fairbairn’s works as an
+apprentice.  From the palaces and Alps, the Mole, the blue Mediterranean,
+the humming lanes and the bright theatres of Genoa, he fell—and he was
+sharply conscious of the fall—to the dim skies and the foul ways of
+Manchester.  England he found on his return ‘a horrid place,’ and there
+is no doubt the family found it a dear one.  The story of the Jenkin
+finances is not easy to follow.  The family, I am told, did not practice
+frugality, only lamented that it should be needful; and Mrs. Jenkin, who
+was always complaining of ‘those dreadful bills,’ was ‘always a good deal
+dressed.’  But at this time of the return to England, things must have
+gone further.  A holiday tour of a fortnight, Fleeming feared would be
+beyond what he could afford, and he only projected it ‘to have a castle
+in the air.’  And there were actual pinches.  Fresh from a warmer sun, he
+was obliged to go without a greatcoat, and learned on railway journeys to
+supply the place of one with wrappings of old newspaper.
+
+From half-past eight till six, he must ‘file and chip vigorously in a
+moleskin suit and infernally dirty.’  The work was not new to him, for he
+had already passed some time in a Genoese shop; and to Fleeming no work
+was without interest.  Whatever a man can do or know, he longed to know
+and do also.  ‘I never learned anything,’ he wrote, ‘not even standing on
+my head, but I found a use for it.’  In the spare hours of his first
+telegraph voyage, to give an instance of his greed of knowledge, he meant
+‘to learn the whole art of navigation, every rope in the ship and how to
+handle her on any occasion’; and once when he was shown a young lady’s
+holiday collection of seaweeds, he must cry out, ‘It showed me my eyes
+had been idle.’  Nor was his the case of the mere literary smatterer,
+content if he but learn the names of things.  In him, to do and to do
+well, was even a dearer ambition than to know.  Anything done well, any
+craft, despatch, or finish, delighted and inspired him.  I remember him
+with a twopenny Japanese box of three drawers, so exactly fitted that,
+when one was driven home, the others started from their places; the whole
+spirit of Japan, he told me, was pictured in that box; that plain piece
+of carpentry was as much inspired by the spirit of perfection as the
+happiest drawing or the finest bronze; and he who could not enjoy it in
+the one was not fully able to enjoy it in the others.  Thus, too, he
+found in Leonardo’s engineering and anatomical drawings a perpetual
+feast; and of the former he spoke even with emotion.  Nothing indeed
+annoyed Fleeming more than the attempt to separate the fine arts from the
+arts of handicraft; any definition or theory that failed to bring these
+two together, according to him, had missed the point; and the essence of
+the pleasure received lay in seeing things well done.  Other qualities
+must be added; he was the last to deny that; but this, of perfect craft,
+was at the bottom of all.  And on the other hand, a nail ill-driven, a
+joint ill-fitted, a tracing clumsily done, anything to which a man had
+set his hand and not set it aptly, moved him to shame and anger.  With
+such a character, he would feel but little drudgery at Fairbairn’s.
+There would be something daily to be done, slovenliness to be avoided,
+and a higher mark of skill to be attained; he would chip and file, as he
+had practiced scales, impatient of his own imperfection, but resolute to
+learn.
+
+And there was another spring of delight.  For he was now moving daily
+among those strange creations of man’s brain, to some so abhorrent, to
+him of an interest so inexhaustible: in which iron, water, and fire are
+made to serve as slaves, now with a tread more powerful than an
+elephant’s, and now with a touch more precise and dainty than a
+pianist’s.  The taste for machinery was one that I could never share with
+him, and he had a certain bitter pity for my weakness.  Once when I had
+proved, for the hundredth time, the depth of this defect, he looked at me
+askance.  ‘And the best of the joke,’ said he, ‘is that he thinks himself
+quite a poet.’  For to him the struggle of the engineer against brute
+forces and with inert allies, was nobly poetic.  Habit never dulled in
+him the sense of the greatness of the aims and obstacles of his
+profession.  Habit only sharpened his inventor’s gusto in contrivance, in
+triumphant artifice, in the Odyssean subtleties, by which wires are
+taught to speak, and iron hands to weave, and the slender ship to brave
+and to outstrip the tempest.  To the ignorant the great results alone are
+admirable; to the knowing, and to Fleeming in particular, rather the
+infinite device and sleight of hand that made them possible.
+
+A notion was current at the time that, in such a shop as Fairbairn’s, a
+pupil would never be popular unless he drank with the workmen and
+imitated them in speech and manner.  Fleeming, who would do none of these
+things, they accepted as a friend and companion; and this was the subject
+of remark in Manchester, where some memory of it lingers till to-day.  He
+thought it one of the advantages of his profession to be brought into a
+close relation with the working classes; and for the skilled artisan he
+had a great esteem, liking his company, his virtues, and his taste in
+some of the arts.  But he knew the classes too well to regard them, like
+a platform speaker, in a lump.  He drew, on the other hand, broad
+distinctions; and it was his profound sense of the difference between one
+working man and another that led him to devote so much time, in later
+days, to the furtherance of technical education.  In 1852 he had occasion
+to see both men and masters at their worst, in the excitement of a
+strike; and very foolishly (after their custom) both would seem to have
+behaved.  Beginning with a fair show of justice on either side, the
+masters stultified their cause by obstinate impolicy, and the men
+disgraced their order by acts of outrage.  ‘On Wednesday last,’ writes
+Fleeming, ‘about three thousand banded round Fairbairn’s door at 6
+o’clock: men, women, and children, factory boys and girls, the lowest of
+the low in a very low place.  Orders came that no one was to leave the
+works; but the men inside (Knobsticks, as they are called) were precious
+hungry and thought they would venture.  Two of my companions and myself
+went out with the very first, and had the full benefit of every possible
+groan and bad language.’  But the police cleared a lane through the
+crowd, the pupils were suffered to escape unhurt, and only the Knobsticks
+followed home and kicked with clogs; so that Fleeming enjoyed, as we may
+say, for nothing, that fine thrill of expectant valour with which he had
+sallied forth into the mob.  ‘I never before felt myself so decidedly
+somebody, instead of nobody,’ he wrote.
+
+Outside as inside the works, he was ‘pretty merry and well to do,’
+zealous in study, welcome to many friends, unwearied in loving-kindness
+to his mother.  For some time he spent three nights a week with Dr. Bell,
+‘working away at certain geometrical methods of getting the Greek
+architectural proportions’: a business after Fleeming’s heart, for he was
+never so pleased as when he could marry his two devotions, art and
+science.  This was besides, in all likelihood, the beginning of that love
+and intimate appreciation of things Greek, from the least to the
+greatest, from the _Agamemnon_ (perhaps his favourite tragedy) down to
+the details of Grecian tailoring, which he used to express in his
+familiar phrase: ‘The Greeks were the boys.’  Dr. Bell—the son of George
+Joseph, the nephew of Sir Charles, and though he made less use of it than
+some, a sharer in the distinguished talents of his race—had hit upon the
+singular fact that certain geometrical intersections gave the proportions
+of the Doric order.  Fleeming, under Dr. Bell’s direction, applied the
+same method to the other orders, and again found the proportions
+accurately given.  Numbers of diagrams were prepared; but the discovery
+was never given to the world, perhaps because of the dissensions that
+arose between the authors.  For Dr. Bell believed that ‘these
+intersections were in some way connected with, or symbolical of, the
+antagonistic forces at work’; but his pupil and helper, with
+characteristic trenchancy, brushed aside this mysticism, and interpreted
+the discovery as ‘a geometrical method of dividing the spaces or (as
+might be said) of setting out the work, purely empirical and in no way
+connected with any laws of either force or beauty.’  ‘Many a hard and
+pleasant fight we had over it,’ wrote Jenkin, in later years; ‘and
+impertinent as it may seem, the pupil is still unconvinced by the
+arguments of the master.’  I do not know about the antagonistic forces in
+the Doric order; in Fleeming they were plain enough; and the Bobadil of
+these affairs with Dr. Bell was still, like the corrector of Italian
+consuls, ‘a great child in everything but information.’  At the house of
+Colonel Cleather, he might be seen with a family of children; and with
+these, there was no word of the Greek orders; with these Fleeming was
+only an uproarious boy and an entertaining draughtsman; so that his
+coming was the signal for the young people to troop into the playroom,
+where sometimes the roof rang with romping, and sometimes they gathered
+quietly about him as he amused them with his pencil.
+
+In another Manchester family, whose name will be familiar to my
+readers—that of the Gaskells, Fleeming was a frequent visitor.  To Mrs.
+Gaskell, he would often bring his new ideas, a process that many of his
+later friends will understand and, in their own cases, remember.  With
+the girls, he had ‘constant fierce wrangles,’ forcing them to reason out
+their thoughts and to explain their prepossessions; and I hear from Miss
+Gaskell that they used to wonder how he could throw all the ardour of his
+character into the smallest matters, and to admire his unselfish devotion
+to his parents.  Of one of these wrangles, I have found a record most
+characteristic of the man.  Fleeming had been laying down his doctrine
+that the end justifies the means, and that it is quite right ‘to boast of
+your six men-servants to a burglar or to steal a knife to prevent a
+murder’; and the Miss Gaskells, with girlish loyalty to what is current,
+had rejected the heresy with indignation.  From such passages-at-arms,
+many retire mortified and ruffled; but Fleeming had no sooner left the
+house than he fell into delighted admiration of the spirit of his
+adversaries.  From that it was but a step to ask himself ‘what truth was
+sticking in their heads’; for even the falsest form of words (in
+Fleeming’s life-long opinion) reposed upon some truth, just as he could
+‘not even allow that people admire ugly things, they admire what is
+pretty in the ugly thing.’  And before he sat down to write his letter,
+he thought he had hit upon the explanation.  ‘I fancy the true idea,’ he
+wrote, ‘is that you must never do yourself or anyone else a moral
+injury—make any man a thief or a liar—for any end’; quite a different
+thing, as he would have loved to point out, from never stealing or lying.
+But this perfervid disputant was not always out of key with his audience.
+One whom he met in the same house announced that she would never again be
+happy.  ‘What does that signify?’ cried Fleeming.  ‘We are not here to be
+happy, but to be good.’  And the words (as his hearer writes to me)
+became to her a sort of motto during life.
+
+From Fairbairn’s and Manchester, Fleeming passed to a railway survey in
+Switzerland, and thence again to Mr. Penn’s at Greenwich, where he was
+engaged as draughtsman.  There in 1856, we find him in ‘a terribly busy
+state, finishing up engines for innumerable gun-boats and steam frigates
+for the ensuing campaign.’  From half-past eight in the morning till nine
+or ten at night, he worked in a crowded office among uncongenial
+comrades, ‘saluted by chaff, generally low personal and not witty,’
+pelted with oranges and apples, regaled with dirty stories, and seeking
+to suit himself with his surroundings or (as he writes it) trying to be
+as little like himself as possible.  His lodgings were hard by, ‘across a
+dirty green and through some half-built streets of two-storied houses’;
+he had Carlyle and the poets, engineering and mathematics, to study by
+himself in such spare time as remained to him; and there were several
+ladies, young and not so young, with whom he liked to correspond.  But
+not all of these could compensate for the absence of that mother, who had
+made herself so large a figure in his life, for sorry surroundings,
+unsuitable society, and work that leaned to the mechanical.  ‘Sunday,’
+says he, ‘I generally visit some friends in town and seem to swim in
+clearer water, but the dirty green seems all the dirtier when I get back.
+Luckily I am fond of my profession, or I could not stand this life.’  It
+is a question in my mind, if he could have long continued to stand it
+without loss.  ‘We are not here to be happy, but to be good,’ quoth the
+young philosopher; but no man had a keener appetite for happiness than
+Fleeming Jenkin.  There is a time of life besides when apart from
+circumstances, few men are agreeable to their neighbours and still fewer
+to themselves; and it was at this stage that Fleeming had arrived, later
+than common and even worse provided.  The letter from which I have quoted
+is the last of his correspondence with Frank Scott, and his last
+confidential letter to one of his own sex.  ‘If you consider it rightly,’
+he wrote long after, ‘you will find the want of correspondence no such
+strange want in men’s friendships.  There is, believe me, something noble
+in the metal which does not rust though not burnished by daily use.’  It
+is well said; but the last letter to Frank Scott is scarcely of a noble
+metal.  It is plain the writer has outgrown his old self, yet not made
+acquaintance with the new.  This letter from a busy youth of three and
+twenty, breathes of seventeen: the sickening alternations of conceit and
+shame, the expense of hope _in vacuo_, the lack of friends, the longing
+after love; the whole world of egoism under which youth stands groaning,
+a voluntary Atlas.
+
+With Fleeming this disease was never seemingly severe.  The very day
+before this (to me) distasteful letter, he had written to Miss Bell of
+Manchester in a sweeter strain; I do not quote the one, I quote the
+other; fair things are the best.  ‘I keep my own little lodgings,’ he
+writes, ‘but come up every night to see mamma’ (who was then on a visit
+to London) ‘if not kept too late at the works; and have singing lessons
+once more, and sing “_Donne l’amore è scaltro pargoletto_”; and think and
+talk about you; and listen to mamma’s projects _de_ Stowting.  Everything
+turns to gold at her touch, she’s a fairy and no mistake.  We go on
+talking till I have a picture in my head, and can hardly believe at the
+end that the original is Stowting.  Even you don’t know half how good
+mamma is; in other things too, which I must not mention.  She teaches me
+how it is not necessary to be very rich to do much good.  I begin to
+understand that mamma would find useful occupation and create beauty at
+the bottom of a volcano.  She has little weaknesses, but is a real
+generous-hearted woman, which I suppose is the finest thing in the
+world.’  Though neither mother nor son could be called beautiful, they
+make a pretty picture; the ugly, generous, ardent woman weaving rainbow
+illusions; the ugly, clear-sighted, loving son sitting at her side in one
+of his rare hours of pleasure, half-beguiled, half-amused, wholly
+admiring, as he listens.  But as he goes home, and the fancy pictures
+fade, and Stowting is once more burthened with debt, and the noisy
+companions and the long hours of drudgery once more approach, no wonder
+if the dirty green seems all the dirtier or if Atlas must resume his
+load.
+
+But in healthy natures, this time of moral teething passes quickly of
+itself, and is easily alleviated by fresh interests; and already, in the
+letter to Frank Scott, there are two words of hope: his friends in
+London, his love for his profession.  The last might have saved him; for
+he was ere long to pass into a new sphere, where all his faculties were
+to be tried and exercised, and his life to be filled with interest and
+effort.  But it was not left to engineering: another and more influential
+aim was to be set before him.  He must, in any case, have fallen in love;
+in any case, his love would have ruled his life; and the question of
+choice was, for the descendant of two such families, a thing of paramount
+importance.  Innocent of the world, fiery, generous, devoted as he was,
+the son of the wild Jacksons and the facile Jenkins might have been led
+far astray.  By one of those partialities that fill men at once with
+gratitude and wonder, his choosing was directed well.  Or are we to say
+that by a man’s choice in marriage, as by a crucial merit, he deserves
+his fortune?  One thing at least reason may discern: that a man but
+partly chooses, he also partly forms, his help-mate; and he must in part
+deserve her, or the treasure is but won for a moment to be lost.
+Fleeming chanced if you will (and indeed all these opportunities are as
+‘random as blind man’s buff’) upon a wife who was worthy of him; but he
+had the wit to know it, the courage to wait and labour for his prize, and
+the tenderness and chivalry that are required to keep such prizes
+precious.  Upon this point he has himself written well, as usual with
+fervent optimism, but as usual (in his own phrase) with a truth sticking
+in his head.
+
+‘Love,’ he wrote, ‘is not an intuition of the person most suitable to us,
+most required by us; of the person with whom life flowers and bears
+fruit.  If this were so, the chances of our meeting that person would be
+small indeed; our intuition would often fail; the blindness of love would
+then be fatal as it is proverbial.  No, love works differently, and in
+its blindness lies its strength.  Man and woman, each strongly desires to
+be loved, each opens to the other that heart of ideal aspirations which
+they have often hid till then; each, thus knowing the ideal of the other,
+tries to fulfil that ideal, each partially succeeds.  The greater the
+love, the greater the success; the nobler the idea of each, the more
+durable, the more beautiful the effect.  Meanwhile the blindness of each
+to the other’s defects enables the transformation to proceed
+[unobserved,] so that when the veil is withdrawn (if it ever is, and this
+I do not know) neither knows that any change has occurred in the person
+whom they loved.  Do not fear, therefore.  I do not tell you that your
+friend will not change, but as I am sure that her choice cannot be that
+of a man with a base ideal, so I am sure the change will be a safe and a
+good one.  Do not fear that anything you love will vanish, he must love
+it too.’
+
+Among other introductions in London, Fleeming had presented a letter from
+Mrs. Gaskell to the Alfred Austins.  This was a family certain to
+interest a thoughtful young man.  Alfred, the youngest and least known of
+the Austins, had been a beautiful golden-haired child, petted and kept
+out of the way of both sport and study by a partial mother.  Bred an
+attorney, he had (like both his brothers) changed his way of life, and
+was called to the bar when past thirty.  A Commission of Enquiry into the
+state of the poor in Dorsetshire gave him an opportunity of proving his
+true talents; and he was appointed a Poor Law Inspector, first at
+Worcester, next at Manchester, where he had to deal with the potato
+famine and the Irish immigration of the ‘forties, and finally in London,
+where he again distinguished himself during an epidemic of cholera.  He
+was then advanced to the Permanent Secretaryship of Her Majesty’s Office
+of Works and Public Buildings; a position which he filled with perfect
+competence, but with an extreme of modesty; and on his retirement, in
+1868, he was made a Companion of the Bath.  While apprentice to a Norwich
+attorney, Alfred Austin was a frequent visitor in the house of Mr.
+Barron, a rallying place in those days of intellectual society.  Edward
+Barron, the son of a rich saddler or leather merchant in the Borough, was
+a man typical of the time.  When he was a child, he had once been patted
+on the head in his father’s shop by no less a man than Samuel Johnson, as
+the Doctor went round the Borough canvassing for Mr. Thrale; and the
+child was true to this early consecration.  ‘A life of lettered ease
+spent in provincial retirement,’ it is thus that the biographer of that
+remarkable man, William Taylor, announces his subject; and the phrase is
+equally descriptive of the life of Edward Barron.  The pair were close
+friends, ‘W. T. and a pipe render everything agreeable,’ writes Barron in
+his diary in 1828; and in 1833, after Barron had moved to London and
+Taylor had tasted the first public failure of his powers, the latter
+wrote: ‘To my ever dearest Mr. Barron say, if you please, that I miss him
+more than I regret him—that I acquiesce in his retirement from Norwich,
+because I could ill brook his observation of my increasing debility of
+mind.’  This chosen companion of William Taylor must himself have been no
+ordinary man; and he was the friend besides of Borrow, whom I find him
+helping in his Latin.  But he had no desire for popular distinction,
+lived privately, married a daughter of Dr. Enfield of Enfield’s
+_Speaker_, and devoted his time to the education of his family, in a
+deliberate and scholarly fashion, and with certain traits of stoicism,
+that would surprise a modern.  From these children we must single out his
+youngest daughter, Eliza, who learned under his care to be a sound Latin,
+an elegant Grecian, and to suppress emotion without outward sign after
+the manner of the Godwin school.  This was the more notable, as the girl
+really derived from the Enfields; whose high-flown romantic temper, I
+wish I could find space to illustrate.  She was but seven years old, when
+Alfred Austin remarked and fell in love with her; and the union thus
+early prepared was singularly full.  Where the husband and wife differed,
+and they did so on momentous subjects, they differed with perfect temper
+and content; and in the conduct of life, and in depth and durability of
+love, they were at one.  Each full of high spirits, each practised
+something of the same repression: no sharp word was uttered in their
+house.  The same point of honour ruled them, a guest was sacred and stood
+within the pale from criticism.  It was a house, besides, of unusual
+intellectual tension.  Mrs. Austin remembered, in the early days of the
+marriage, the three brothers, John, Charles, and Alfred, marching to and
+fro, each with his hands behind his back, and ‘reasoning high’ till
+morning; and how, like Dr. Johnson, they would cheer their speculations
+with as many as fifteen cups of tea.  And though, before the date of
+Fleeming’s visit, the brothers were separated, Charles long ago retired
+from the world at Brandeston, and John already near his end in the
+‘rambling old house’ at Weybridge, Alfred Austin and his wife were still
+a centre of much intellectual society, and still, as indeed they remained
+until the last, youthfully alert in mind.  There was but one child of the
+marriage, Anne, and she was herself something new for the eyes of the
+young visitor; brought up, as she had been, like her mother before her,
+to the standard of a man’s acquirements.  Only one art had she been
+denied, she must not learn the violin—the thought was too monstrous even
+for the Austins; and indeed it would seem as if that tide of reform which
+we may date from the days of Mary Wollstonecraft had in some degree even
+receded; for though Miss Austin was suffered to learn Greek, the
+accomplishment was kept secret like a piece of guilt.  But whether this
+stealth was caused by a backward movement in public thought since the
+time of Edward Barron, or by the change from enlightened Norwich to
+barbarian London, I have no means of judging.
+
+When Fleeming presented his letter, he fell in love at first sight with
+Mrs. Austin and the life, and atmosphere of the house.  There was in the
+society of the Austins, outward, stoical conformers to the world,
+something gravely suggestive of essential eccentricity, something
+unpretentiously breathing of intellectual effort, that could not fail to
+hit the fancy of this hot-brained boy.  The unbroken enamel of courtesy,
+the self-restraint, the dignified kindness of these married folk, had
+besides a particular attraction for their visitor.  He could not but
+compare what he saw, with what he knew of his mother and himself.
+Whatever virtues Fleeming possessed, he could never count on being civil;
+whatever brave, true-hearted qualities he was able to admire in Mrs.
+Jenkin, mildness of demeanour was not one of them.  And here he found per
+sons who were the equals of his mother and himself in intellect and width
+of interest, and the equals of his father in mild urbanity of
+disposition.  Show Fleeming an active virtue, and he always loved it.  He
+went away from that house struck through with admiration, and vowing to
+himself that his own married life should be upon that pattern, his wife
+(whoever she might be) like Eliza Barron, himself such another husband as
+Alfred Austin.  What is more strange, he not only brought away, but left
+behind him, golden opinions.  He must have been—he was, I am told—a
+trying lad; but there shone out of him such a light of innocent candour,
+enthusiasm, intelligence, and appreciation, that to persons already some
+way forward in years, and thus able to enjoy indulgently the perennial
+comedy of youth, the sight of him was delightful.  By a pleasant
+coincidence, there was one person in the house whom he did not appreciate
+and who did not appreciate him: Anne Austin, his future wife.  His boyish
+vanity ruffled her; his appearance, never impressive, was then, by reason
+of obtrusive boyishness, still less so; she found occasion to put him in
+the wrong by correcting a false quantity; and when Mr. Austin, after
+doing his visitor the almost unheard-of honour of accompanying him to the
+door, announced ‘That was what young men were like in my time’—she could
+only reply, looking on her handsome father, ‘I thought they had been
+better looking.’
+
+This first visit to the Austins took place in 1855; and it seems it was
+some time before Fleeming began to know his mind; and yet longer ere he
+ventured to show it.  The corrected quantity, to those who knew him well,
+will seem to have played its part; he was the man always to reflect over
+a correction and to admire the castigator.  And fall in love he did; not
+hurriedly but step by step, not blindly but with critical discrimination;
+not in the fashion of Romeo, but before he was done, with all Romeo’s
+ardour and more than Romeo’s faith.  The high favour to which he
+presently rose in the esteem of Alfred Austin and his wife, might well
+give him ambitious notions; but the poverty of the present and the
+obscurity of the future were there to give him pause; and when his
+aspirations began to settle round Miss Austin, he tasted, perhaps for the
+only time in his life, the pangs of diffidence.  There was indeed opening
+before him a wide door of hope.  He had changed into the service of
+Messrs. Liddell & Gordon; these gentlemen had begun to dabble in the new
+field of marine telegraphy; and Fleeming was already face to face with
+his life’s work.  That impotent sense of his own value, as of a ship
+aground, which makes one of the agonies of youth, began to fall from him.
+New problems which he was endowed to solve, vistas of new enquiry which
+he was fitted to explore, opened before him continually.  His gifts had
+found their avenue and goal.  And with this pleasure of effective
+exercise, there must have sprung up at once the hope of what is called by
+the world success.  But from these low beginnings, it was a far look
+upward to Miss Austin: the favour of the loved one seems always more than
+problematical to any lover; the consent of parents must be always more
+than doubtful to a young man with a small salary and no capital except
+capacity and hope.  But Fleeming was not the lad to lose any good thing
+for the lack of trial; and at length, in the autumn of 1857, this
+boyish-sized, boyish-mannered, and superlatively ill-dressed young
+engineer, entered the house of the Austins, with such sinkings as we may
+fancy, and asked leave to pay his addresses to the daughter.  Mrs. Austin
+already loved him like a son, she was but too glad to give him her
+consent; Mr. Austin reserved the right to inquire into his character;
+from neither was there a word about his prospects, by neither was his
+income mentioned.  ‘Are these people,’ he wrote, struck with wonder at
+this dignified disinterestedness, ‘are these people the same as other
+people?’  It was not till he was armed with this permission, that Miss
+Austin even suspected the nature of his hopes: so strong, in this
+unmannerly boy, was the principle of true courtesy; so powerful, in this
+impetuous nature, the springs of self-repression.  And yet a boy he was;
+a boy in heart and mind; and it was with a boy’s chivalry and frankness
+that he won his wife.  His conduct was a model of honour, hardly of tact;
+to conceal love from the loved one, to court her parents, to be silent
+and discreet till these are won, and then without preparation to approach
+the lady—these are not arts that I would recommend for imitation.  They
+lead to final refusal.  Nothing saved Fleeming from that fate, but one
+circumstance that cannot be counted upon—the hearty favour of the mother,
+and one gift that is inimitable and that never failed him throughout
+life, the gift of a nature essentially noble and outspoken.  A happy and
+high-minded anger flashed through his despair: it won for him his wife.
+
+Nearly two years passed before it was possible to marry: two years of
+activity, now in London; now at Birkenhead, fitting out ships, inventing
+new machinery for new purposes, and dipping into electrical experiment;
+now in the _Elba_ on his first telegraph cruise between Sardinia and
+Algiers: a busy and delightful period of bounding ardour, incessant toil,
+growing hope and fresh interests, with behind and through all, the image
+of his beloved.  A few extracts from his correspondence with his
+betrothed will give the note of these truly joyous years.  ‘My profession
+gives me all the excitement and interest I ever hope for, but the sorry
+jade is obviously jealous of you.’—‘“Poor Fleeming,” in spite of wet,
+cold and wind, clambering over moist, tarry slips, wandering among pools
+of slush in waste places inhabited by wandering locomotives, grows
+visibly stronger, has dismissed his office cough and cured his
+toothache.’—‘The whole of the paying out and lifting machinery must be
+designed and ordered in two or three days, and I am half crazy with work.
+I like it though: it’s like a good ball, the excitement carries you
+through.’—‘I was running to and from the ships and warehouse through
+fierce gusts of rain and wind till near eleven, and you cannot think what
+a pleasure it was to be blown about and think of you in your pretty
+dress.’—‘I am at the works till ten and sometimes till eleven.  But I
+have a nice office to sit in, with a fire to myself, and bright brass
+scientific instruments all round me, and books to read, and experiments
+to make, and enjoy myself amazingly.  I find the study of electricity so
+entertaining that I am apt to neglect my other work.’  And for a last
+taste, ‘Yesterday I had some charming electrical experiments.  What shall
+I compare them to—a new song? a Greek play?’
+
+It was at this time besides that he made the acquaintance of Professor,
+now Sir William, Thomson.  To describe the part played by these two in
+each other’s lives would lie out of my way.  They worked together on the
+Committee on Electrical Standards; they served together at the laying
+down or the repair of many deep-sea cables; and Sir William was regarded
+by Fleeming, not only with the ‘worship’ (the word is his own) due to
+great scientific gifts, but with an ardour of personal friendship not
+frequently excelled.  To their association, Fleeming brought the valuable
+element of a practical understanding; but he never thought or spoke of
+himself where Sir William was in question; and I recall quite in his last
+days, a singular instance of this modest loyalty to one whom he admired
+and loved.  He drew up a paper, in a quite personal interest, of his own
+services; yet even here he must step out of his way, he must add, where
+it had no claim to be added, his opinion that, in their joint work, the
+contributions of Sir William had been always greatly the most valuable.
+Again, I shall not readily forget with what emotion he once told me an
+incident of their associated travels.  On one of the mountain ledges of
+Madeira, Fleeming’s pony bolted between Sir William. and the precipice
+above; by strange good fortune and thanks to the steadiness of Sir
+William’s horse, no harm was done; but for the moment, Fleeming saw his
+friend hurled into the sea, and almost by his own act: it was a memory
+that haunted him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.  1859–1868.
+
+
+Fleeming’s Marriage—His Married Life—Professional Difficulties—Life at
+Claygate—Illness of Mrs. F. Jenkin; and of Fleeming—Appointment to the
+Chair at Edinburgh.
+
+ON Saturday, Feb. 26, 1859, profiting by a holiday of four days, Fleeming
+was married to Miss Austin at Northiam: a place connected not only with
+his own family but with that of his bride as well.  By Tuesday morning,
+he was at work again, fitting out cableships at Birkenhead.  Of the walk
+from his lodgings to the works, I find a graphic sketch in one of his
+letters: ‘Out over the railway bridge, along a wide road raised to the
+level of a ground floor above the land, which, not being built upon,
+harbours puddles, ponds, pigs, and Irish hovels;—so to the dock
+warehouses, four huge piles of building with no windows, surrounded by a
+wall about twelve feet high—in through the large gates, round which hang
+twenty or thirty rusty Irish, playing pitch and toss and waiting for
+employment;—on along the railway, which came in at the same gates and
+which branches down between each vast block—past a pilot-engine butting
+refractory trucks into their places—on to the last block, [and] down the
+branch, sniffing the guano-scented air and detecting the old bones.  The
+hartshorn flavour of the guano becomes very strong, as I near the docks
+where, across the _Elba’s_ decks, a huge vessel is discharging her cargo
+of the brown dust, and where huge vessels have been discharging that same
+cargo for the last five months.’  This was the walk he took his young
+wife on the morrow of his return.  She had been used to the society of
+lawyers and civil servants, moving in that circle which seems to itself
+the pivot of the nation and is in truth only a clique like another; and
+Fleeming was to her the nameless assistant of a nameless firm of
+engineers, doing his inglorious business, as she now saw for herself,
+among unsavoury surroundings.  But when their walk brought them within
+view of the river, she beheld a sight to her of the most novel beauty:
+four great, sea-going ships dressed out with flags.  ‘How lovely!’ she
+cried.  ‘What is it for?’—‘For you,’ said Fleeming.  Her surprise was
+only equalled by her pleasure.  But perhaps, for what we may call private
+fame, there is no life like that of the engineer; who is a great man in
+out-of-the-way places, by the dockside or on the desert island or in
+populous ships, and remains quite unheard of in the coteries of London.
+And Fleeming had already made his mark among the few who had an
+opportunity of knowing him.
+
+His marriage was the one decisive incident of his career; from that
+moment until the day of his death, he had one thought to which all the
+rest were tributary, the thought of his wife.  No one could know him even
+slightly, and not remark the absorbing greatness of that sentiment; nor
+can any picture of the man be drawn that does not in proportion dwell
+upon it.  This is a delicate task; but if we are to leave behind us (as
+we wish) some presentment of the friend we have lost, it is a task that
+must be undertaken.
+
+For all his play of mind and fancy, for all his indulgence—and, as time
+went on, he grew indulgent—Fleeming had views of duty that were even
+stern.  He was too shrewd a student of his fellow-men to remain long
+content with rigid formulæ of conduct.  Iron-bound, impersonal ethics,
+the procrustean bed of rules, he soon saw at their true value as the
+deification of averages.  ‘As to Miss (I declare I forget her name) being
+bad,’ I find him writing, ‘people only mean that she has broken the
+Decalogue—which is not at all the same thing.  People who have kept in
+the high-road of Life really have less opportunity for taking a
+comprehensive view of it than those who have leaped over the hedges and
+strayed up the hills; not but what the hedges are very necessary, and our
+stray travellers often have a weary time of it.  So, you may say, have
+those in the dusty roads.’  Yet he was himself a very stern respecter of
+the hedgerows; sought safety and found dignity in the obvious path of
+conduct; and would palter with no simple and recognised duty of his
+epoch.  Of marriage in particular, of the bond so formed, of the
+obligations incurred, of the debt men owe to their children, he conceived
+in a truly antique spirit: not to blame others, but to constrain himself.
+It was not to blame, I repeat, that he held these views; for others, he
+could make a large allowance; and yet he tacitly expected of his friends
+and his wife a high standard of behaviour.  Nor was it always easy to
+wear the armour of that ideal.
+
+Acting upon these beliefs; conceiving that he had indeed ‘given himself’
+(in the full meaning of these words) for better, for worse; painfully
+alive to his defects of temper and deficiency in charm; resolute to make
+up for these; thinking last of himself: Fleeming was in some ways the
+very man to have made a noble, uphill fight of an unfortunate marriage.
+In other ways, it is true he was one of the most unfit for such a trial.
+And it was his beautiful destiny to remain to the last hour the same
+absolute and romantic lover, who had shown to his new bride the
+flag-draped vessels in the Mersey.  No fate is altogether easy; but
+trials are our touchstone, trials overcome our reward; and it was given
+to Fleeming to conquer.  It was given to him to live for another, not as
+a task, but till the end as an enchanting pleasure.  ‘People may write
+novels,’ he wrote in 1869, ‘and other people may write poems, but not a
+man or woman among them can write to say how happy a man may be, who is
+desperately in love with his wife after ten years of marriage.’  And
+again in 1885, after more than twenty-six years of marriage, and within
+but five weeks of his death: ‘Your first letter from Bournemouth,’ he
+wrote, ‘gives me heavenly pleasure—for which I thank Heaven and you
+too—who are my heaven on earth.’  The mind hesitates whether to say that
+such a man has been more good or more fortunate.
+
+Any woman (it is the defect of her sex) comes sooner to the stable mind
+of maturity than any man; and Jenkin was to the end of a most deliberate
+growth.  In the next chapter, when I come to deal with his telegraphic
+voyages and give some taste of his correspondence, the reader will still
+find him at twenty-five an arrant school-boy.  His wife besides was more
+thoroughly educated than he.  In many ways she was able to teach him, and
+he proud to be taught; in many ways she outshone him, and he delighted to
+be outshone.  All these superiorities, and others that, after the manner
+of lovers, he no doubt forged for himself, added as time went on to the
+humility of his original love.  Only once, in all I know of his career,
+did he show a touch of smallness.  He could not learn to sing correctly;
+his wife told him so and desisted from her lessons; and the mortification
+was so sharply felt that for years he could not be induced to go to a
+concert, instanced himself as a typical man without an ear, and never
+sang again.  I tell it; for the fact that this stood singular in his
+behaviour, and really amazed all who knew him, is the happiest way I can
+imagine to commend the tenor of his simplicity; and because it
+illustrates his feeling for his wife.  Others were always welcome to
+laugh at him; if it amused them, or if it amused him, he would proceed
+undisturbed with his occupation, his vanity invulnerable.  With his wife
+it was different: his wife had laughed at his singing; and for twenty
+years the fibre ached.  Nothing, again, was more notable than the formal
+chivalry of this unmannered man to the person on earth with whom he was
+the most familiar.  He was conscious of his own innate and often rasping
+vivacity and roughness and he was never forgetful of his first visit to
+the Austins and the vow he had registered on his return.  There was thus
+an artificial element in his punctilio that at times might almost raise a
+smile.  But it stood on noble grounds; for this was how he sought to
+shelter from his own petulance the woman who was to him the symbol of the
+household and to the end the beloved of his youth.
+
+I wish in this chapter to chronicle small beer; taking a hasty glance at
+some ten years of married life and of professional struggle; and
+reserving till the next all the more interesting matter of his cruises.
+Of his achievements and their worth, it is not for me to speak: his
+friend and partner, Sir William Thomson, has contributed a note on the
+subject, which will be found in the Appendix, and to which I must refer
+the reader.  He is to conceive in the meanwhile for himself Fleeming’s
+manifold engagements: his service on the Committee on Electrical
+Standards, his lectures on electricity at Chatham, his chair at the
+London University, his partnership with Sir William Thomson and Mr.
+Varley in many ingenious patents, his growing credit with engineers and
+men of science; and he is to bear in mind that of all this activity and
+acquist of reputation, the immediate profit was scanty.  Soon after his
+marriage, Fleeming had left the service of Messrs. Liddell & Gordon, and
+entered into a general engineering partnership with Mr. Forde, a
+gentleman in a good way of business.  It was a fortunate partnership in
+this, that the parties retained their mutual respect unlessened and
+separated with regret; but men’s affairs, like men, have their times of
+sickness, and by one of these unaccountable variations, for hard upon ten
+years the business was disappointing and the profits meagre.  ‘Inditing
+drafts of German railways which will never get made’: it is thus I find
+Fleeming, not without a touch of bitterness, describe his occupation.
+Even the patents hung fire at first.  There was no salary to rely on;
+children were coming and growing up; the prospect was often anxious.  In
+the days of his courtship, Fleeming had written to Miss Austin a
+dissuasive picture of the trials of poverty, assuring her these were no
+figments but truly bitter to support; he told her this, he wrote,
+beforehand, so that when the pinch came and she suffered, she should not
+be disappointed in herself nor tempted to doubt her own magnanimity: a
+letter of admirable wisdom and solicitude.  But now that the trouble
+came, he bore it very lightly.  It was his principle, as he once prettily
+expressed it, ‘to enjoy each day’s happiness, as it arises, like birds or
+children.’  His optimism, if driven out at the door, would come in again
+by the window; if it found nothing but blackness in the present, would
+hit upon some ground of consolation in the future or the past.  And his
+courage and energy were indefatigable.  In the year 1863, soon after the
+birth of their first son, they moved into a cottage at Claygate near
+Esher; and about this time, under manifold troubles both of money and
+health, I find him writing from abroad: ‘The country will give us, please
+God, health and strength.  I will love and cherish you more than ever,
+you shall go where you wish, you shall receive whom you wish—and as for
+money you shall have that too.  I cannot be mistaken.  I have now
+measured myself with many men.  I do not feel weak, I do not feel that I
+shall fail.  In many things I have succeeded, and I will in this.  And
+meanwhile the time of waiting, which, please Heaven, shall not be long,
+shall also not be so bitter.  Well, well, I promise much, and do not know
+at this moment how you and the dear child are.  If he is but better,
+courage, my girl, for I see light.’
+
+This cottage at Claygate stood just without the village, well surrounded
+with trees and commanding a pleasant view.  A piece of the garden was
+turfed over to form a croquet green, and Fleeming became (I need scarce
+say) a very ardent player.  He grew ardent, too, in gardening.  This he
+took up at first to please his wife, having no natural inclination; but
+he had no sooner set his hand to it, than, like everything else he
+touched, it became with him a passion.  He budded roses, he potted
+cuttings in the coach-house; if there came a change of weather at night,
+he would rise out of bed to protect his favourites; when he was thrown
+with a dull companion, it was enough for him to discover in the man a
+fellow gardener; on his travels, he would go out of his way to visit
+nurseries and gather hints; and to the end of his life, after other
+occupations prevented him putting his own hand to the spade, he drew up a
+yearly programme for his gardener, in which all details were regulated.
+He had begun by this time to write.  His paper on Darwin, which had the
+merit of convincing on one point the philosopher himself, had indeed been
+written before this in London lodgings; but his pen was not idle at
+Claygate; and it was here he wrote (among other things) that review of
+‘_Fecundity_, _Fertility_, _Sterility_, _and Allied Topics_,’ which Dr.
+Matthews Duncan prefixed by way of introduction to the second edition of
+the work.  The mere act of writing seems to cheer the vanity of the most
+incompetent; but a correction accepted by Darwin, and a whole review
+borrowed and reprinted by Matthews Duncan are compliments of a rare
+strain, and to a man still unsuccessful must have been precious indeed.
+There was yet a third of the same kind in store for him; and when Munro
+himself owned that he had found instruction in the paper on Lucretius, we
+may say that Fleeming had been crowned in the capitol of reviewing.
+
+Croquet, charades, Christmas magic lanterns for the village children, an
+amateur concert or a review article in the evening; plenty of hard work
+by day; regular visits to meetings of the British Association, from one
+of which I find him characteristically writing: ‘I cannot say that I have
+had any amusement yet, but I am enjoying the dulness and dry bustle of
+the whole thing’; occasional visits abroad on business, when he would
+find the time to glean (as I have said) gardening hints for himself, and
+old folk-songs or new fashions of dress for his wife; and the continual
+study and care of his children: these were the chief elements of his
+life.  Nor were friends wanting.  Captain and Mrs. Jenkin, Mr. and Mrs.
+Austin, Clerk Maxwell, Miss Bell of Manchester, and others came to them
+on visits.  Mr. Hertslet of the Foreign Office, his wife and his
+daughter, were neighbours and proved kind friends; in 1867 the Howitts
+came to Claygate and sought the society of ‘the two bright, clever young
+people’; {113} and in a house close by, Mr. Frederick Ricketts came to
+live with his family.  Mr. Ricketts was a valued friend during his short
+life; and when he was lost with every circumstance of heroism in the _La
+Plata_, Fleeming mourned him sincerely.
+
+I think I shall give the best idea of Fleeming in this time of his early
+married life, by a few sustained extracts from his letters to his wife,
+while she was absent on a visit in 1864.
+
+    ‘_Nov._ 11.—Sunday was too wet to walk to Isleworth, for which I was
+    sorry, so I staid and went to Church and thought of you at Ardwick
+    all through the Commandments, and heard Dr. — expound in a remarkable
+    way a prophecy of St. Paul’s about Roman Catholics, which _mutatis
+    mutandis_ would do very well for Protestants in some parts.  Then I
+    made a little nursery of Borecole and Enfield market cabbage,
+    grubbing in wet earth with leggings and gray coat on.  Then I tidied
+    up the coach-house to my own and Christine’s admiration.  Then
+    encouraged by _bouts-rimés_ I wrote you a copy of verses; high time I
+    think; I shall just save my tenth year of knowing my lady-love
+    without inditing poetry or rhymes to her.
+
+    ‘Then I rummaged over the box with my father’s letters and found
+    interesting notes from myself.  One I should say my first letter,
+    which little Austin I should say would rejoice to see and shall
+    see—with a drawing of a cottage and a spirited “cob.”  What was more
+    to the purpose, I found with it a paste-cutter which Mary begged
+    humbly for Christine and I generously gave this morning.
+
+    ‘Then I read some of Congreve.  There are admirable scenes in the
+    manner of Sheridan; all wit and no character, or rather one character
+    in a great variety of situations and scenes.  I could show you some
+    scenes, but others are too coarse even for my stomach hardened by a
+    course of French novels.
+
+    ‘All things look so happy for the rain.
+
+    ‘_Nov._ 16.—Verbenas looking well. . . . I am but a poor creature
+    without you; I have naturally no spirit or fun or enterprise in me.
+    Only a kind of mechanical capacity for ascertaining whether two
+    really is half four, etc.; but when you are near me I can fancy that
+    I too shine, and vainly suppose it to be my proper light; whereas by
+    my extreme darkness when you are not by, it clearly can only be by a
+    reflected brilliance that I seem aught but dull.  Then for the moral
+    part of me: if it were not for you and little Odden, I should feel by
+    no means sure that I had any affection power in me. . . . Even the
+    muscular me suffers a sad deterioration in your absence.  I don’t get
+    up when I ought to, I have snoozed in my chair after dinner; I do not
+    go in at the garden with my wonted vigour, and feel ten times as
+    tired as usual with a walk in your absence; so you see, when you are
+    not by, I am a person without ability, affections or vigour, but
+    droop dull, selfish, and spiritless; can you wonder that I love you?
+
+    ‘_Nov._ 17.—. . . I am very glad we married young.  I would not have
+    missed these five years, no, not for any hopes; they are my own.
+
+    ‘_Nov._ 30.—I got through my Chatham lecture very fairly though
+    almost all my apparatus went astray.  I dined at the mess, and got
+    home to Isleworth the same evening; your father very kindly sitting
+    up for me.
+
+    ‘_Dec._ 1.—Back at dear Claygate.  Many cuttings flourish, especially
+    those which do honour to your hand.  Your Californian annuals are up
+    and about.  Badger is fat, the grass green. . . .
+
+    ‘_Dec._ 3.—Odden will not talk of you, while you are away, having
+    inherited, as I suspect, his father’s way of declining to consider a
+    subject which is painful, as your absence is. . . . I certainly
+    should like to learn Greek and I think it would be a capital pastime
+    for the long winter evenings. . . . How things are misrated!  I
+    declare croquet is a noble occupation compared to the pursuits of
+    business men.  As for so-called idleness—that is, one form of it—I
+    vow it is the noblest aim of man.  When idle, one can love, one can
+    be good, feel kindly to all, devote oneself to others, be thankful
+    for existence, educate one’s mind, one’s heart, one’s body.  When
+    busy, as I am busy now or have been busy to-day, one feels just as
+    you sometimes felt when you were too busy, owing to want of servants.
+
+    ‘_Dec._ 5.—On Sunday I was at Isleworth, chiefly engaged in playing
+    with Odden.  We had the most enchanting walk together through the
+    brickfields.  It was very muddy, and, as he remarked, not fit for
+    Nanna, but fit for us _men_.  The dreary waste of bared earth,
+    thatched sheds and standing water, was a paradise to him; and when we
+    walked up planks to deserted mixing and crushing mills, and actually
+    saw where the clay was stirred with long iron prongs, and chalk or
+    lime ground with “a tind of a mill,” his expression of contentment
+    and triumphant heroism knew no limit to its beauty.  Of course on
+    returning I found Mrs. Austin looking out at the door in an anxious
+    manner, and thinking we had been out quite long enough. . . . I am
+    reading Don Quixote chiefly and am his fervent admirer, but I am so
+    sorry he did not place his affections on a Dulcinea of somewhat
+    worthier stamp.  In fact I think there must be a mistake about it.
+    Don Quixote might and would serve his lady in most preposterous
+    fashion, but I am sure he would have chosen a lady of merit.  He
+    imagined her to be such no doubt, and drew a charming picture of her
+    occupations by the banks of the river; but in his other imaginations,
+    there was some kind of peg on which to hang the false costumes he
+    created; windmills are big, and wave their arms like giants; sheep in
+    the distance are somewhat like an army; a little boat on the
+    river-side must look much the same whether enchanted or belonging to
+    millers; but except that Dulcinea is a woman, she bears no
+    resemblance at all to the damsel of his imagination.’
+
+At the time of these letters, the oldest son only was born to them.  In
+September of the next year, with the birth of the second, Charles Frewen,
+there befell Fleeming a terrible alarm and what proved to be a lifelong
+misfortune.  Mrs. Jenkin was taken suddenly and alarmingly ill; Fleeming
+ran a matter of two miles to fetch the doctor, and, drenched with sweat
+as he was, returned with him at once in an open gig.  On their arrival at
+the house, Mrs. Jenkin half unconsciously took and kept hold of her
+husband’s hand.  By the doctor’s orders, windows and doors were set open
+to create a thorough draught, and the patient was on no account to be
+disturbed.  Thus, then, did Fleeming pass the whole of that night,
+crouching on the floor in the draught, and not daring to move lest he
+should wake the sleeper.  He had never been strong; energy had stood him
+instead of vigour; and the result of that night’s exposure was flying
+rheumatism varied by settled sciatica.  Sometimes it quite disabled him,
+sometimes it was less acute; but he was rarely free from it until his
+death.  I knew him for many years; for more than ten we were closely
+intimate; I have lived with him for weeks; and during all this time, he
+only once referred to his infirmity and then perforce as an excuse for
+some trouble he put me to, and so slightly worded that I paid no heed.
+This is a good measure of his courage under sufferings of which none but
+the untried will think lightly.  And I think it worth noting how this
+optimist was acquainted with pain.  It will seem strange only to the
+superficial.  The disease of pessimism springs never from real troubles,
+which it braces men to bear, which it delights men to bear well.  Nor
+does it readily spring at all, in minds that have conceived of life as a
+field of ordered duties, not as a chase in which to hunt for
+gratifications.  ‘We are not here to be happy, but to be good’; I wish he
+had mended the phrase: ‘We are not here to be happy, but to try to be
+good,’ comes nearer the modesty of truth.  With such old-fashioned
+morality, it is possible to get through life, and see the worst of it,
+and feel some of the worst of it, and still acquiesce piously and even
+gladly in man’s fate.  Feel some of the worst of it, I say; for some of
+the rest of the worst is, by this simple faith, excluded.
+
+It was in the year 1868, that the clouds finally rose.  The business in
+partnership with Mr. Forde began suddenly to pay well; about the same
+time the patents showed themselves a valuable property; and but a little
+after, Fleeming was appointed to the new chair of engineering in the
+University of Edinburgh.  Thus, almost at once, pecuniary embarrassments
+passed for ever out of his life.  Here is his own epilogue to the time at
+Claygate, and his anticipations of the future in Edinburgh.
+
+    ‘ . . . . The dear old house at Claygate is not let and the pretty
+    garden a mass of weeds.  I feel rather as if we had behaved unkindly
+    to them.  We were very happy there, but now that it is over I am
+    conscious of the weight of anxiety as to money which I bore all the
+    time.  With you in the garden, with Austin in the coach-house, with
+    pretty songs in the little, low white room, with the moonlight in the
+    dear room up-stairs, ah, it was perfect; but the long walk,
+    wondering, pondering, fearing, scheming, and the dusty jolting
+    railway, and the horrid fusty office with its endless
+    disappointments, they are well gone.  It is well enough to fight and
+    scheme and bustle about in the eager crowd here [in London] for a
+    while now and then, but not for a lifetime.  What I have now is just
+    perfect.  Study for winter, action for summer, lovely country for
+    recreation, a pleasant town for talk . . .’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.—NOTES OF TELEGRAPH VOYAGES, 1858 TO 1873.
+
+
+BUT it is now time to see Jenkin at his life’s work.  I have before me
+certain imperfect series of letters written, as he says, ‘at hazard, for
+one does not know at the time what is important and what is not’: the
+earlier addressed to Miss Austin, after the betrothal; the later to Mrs.
+Jenkin the young wife.  I should premise that I have allowed myself
+certain editorial freedoms, leaving out and splicing together much as he
+himself did with the Bona cable: thus edited the letters speak for
+themselves, and will fail to interest none who love adventure or
+activity.  Addressed as they were to her whom he called his ‘dear
+engineering pupil,’ they give a picture of his work so clear that a child
+may understand, and so attractive that I am half afraid their publication
+may prove harmful, and still further crowd the ranks of a profession
+already overcrowded.  But their most engaging quality is the picture of
+the writer; with his indomitable self-confidence and courage, his
+readiness in every pinch of circumstance or change of plan, and his ever
+fresh enjoyment of the whole web of human experience, nature, adventure,
+science, toil and rest, society and solitude.  It should be borne in mind
+that the writer of these buoyant pages was, even while he wrote, harassed
+by responsibility, stinted in sleep and often struggling with the
+prostration of sea-sickness.  To this last enemy, which he never
+overcame, I have omitted, in my search after condensation, a good many
+references; if they were all left, such was the man’s temper, they would
+not represent one hundredth part of what he suffered, for he was never
+given to complaint.  But indeed he had met this ugly trifle, as he met
+every thwart circumstance of life, with a certain pleasure of pugnacity;
+and suffered it not to check him, whether in the exercise of his
+profession or the pursuit of amusement.
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+                                              ‘Birkenhead: April 18, 1858.
+
+‘Well, you should know, Mr. — having a contract to lay down a submarine
+telegraph from Sardinia to Africa failed three times in the attempt.  The
+distance from land to land is about 140 miles.  On the first occasion,
+after proceeding some 70 miles, he had to cut the cable—the cause I
+forget; he tried again, same result; then picked up about 20 miles of the
+lost cable, spliced on a new piece, and very nearly got across that time,
+but ran short of cable, and when but a few miles off Galita in very deep
+water, had to telegraph to London for more cable to be manufactured and
+sent out whilst he tried to stick to the end: for five days, I think, he
+lay there sending and receiving messages, but heavy weather coming on the
+cable parted and Mr. — went home in despair—at least I should think so.
+
+‘He then applied to those eminent engineers, R. S. Newall & Co., who made
+and laid down a cable for him last autumn—Fleeming Jenkin (at the time in
+considerable mental agitation) having the honour of fitting out the
+_Elba_ for that purpose.’  [On this occasion, the _Elba_ has no cable to
+lay; but] ‘is going out in the beginning of May to endeavour to fish up
+the cables Mr. — lost.  There are two ends at or near the shore: the
+third will probably not be found within 20 miles from land.  One of these
+ends will be passed over a very big pulley or sheave at the bows, passed
+six times round a big barrel or drum; which will be turned round by a
+steam engine on deck, and thus wind up the cable, while the _Elba_ slowly
+steams ahead.  The cable is not wound round and round the drum as your
+silk is wound on its reel, but on the contrary never goes round more than
+six times, going off at one side as it comes on at the other, and going
+down into the hold of the _Elba_ to be coiled along in a big coil or
+skein.
+
+‘I went down to Gateshead to discuss with Mr. Newall the form which this
+tolerably simple idea should take, and have been busy since I came here
+drawing, ordering, and putting up the machinery—uninterfered with, thank
+goodness, by any one.  I own I like responsibility; it flatters one and
+then, your father might say, I have more to gain than to lose.  Moreover
+I do like this bloodless, painless combat with wood and iron, forcing the
+stubborn rascals to do my will, licking the clumsy cubs into an active
+shape, seeing the child of to-day’s thought working to-morrow in full
+vigour at his appointed task.
+
+                                                                  ‘May 12.
+
+‘By dint of bribing, bullying, cajoling, and going day by day to see the
+state of things ordered, all my work is very nearly ready now; but those
+who have neglected these precautions are of course disappointed.  Five
+hundred fathoms of chain [were] ordered by—some three weeks since, to be
+ready by the 10th without fail; he sends for it to-day—150 fathoms all
+they can let us have by the 15th—and how the rest is to be got, who
+knows?  He ordered a boat a month since and yesterday we could see
+nothing of her but the keel and about two planks.  I could multiply
+instances without end.  At first one goes nearly mad with vexation at
+these things; but one finds so soon that they are the rule, that then it
+becomes necessary to feign a rage one does not feel.  I look upon it as
+the natural order of things, that if I order a thing, it will not be
+done—if by accident it gets done, it will certainly be done wrong: the
+only remedy being to watch the performance at every stage.
+
+‘To-day was a grand field-day.  I had steam up and tried the engine
+against pressure or resistance.  One part of the machinery is driven by a
+belt or strap of leather.  I always had my doubts this might slip; and so
+it did, wildly.  I had made provision for doubling it, putting on two
+belts instead of one.  No use—off they went, slipping round and off the
+pulleys instead of driving the machinery.  Tighten them—no use.  More
+strength there—down with the lever—smash something, tear the belts, but
+get them tight—now then, stand clear, on with the steam;—and the belts
+slip away as if nothing held them.  Men begin to look queer; the circle
+of quidnuncs make sage remarks.  Once more—no use.  I begin to know I
+ought to feel sheepish and beat, but somehow I feel cocky instead.  I
+laugh and say, “Well, I am bound to break something down”—and suddenly
+see.  “Oho, there’s the place; get weight on there, and the belt won’t
+slip.”  With much labour, on go the belts again.  “Now then, a spar thro’
+there and six men’s weight on; mind you’re not carried away.”—“Ay, ay,
+sir.”  But evidently no one believes in the plan.  “Hurrah, round she
+goes—stick to your spar.  All right, shut off steam.”  And the difficulty
+is vanquished.
+
+‘This or such as this (not always quite so bad) occurs hour after hour,
+while five hundred tons of coal are rattling down into the holds and
+bunkers, riveters are making their infernal row all round, and riggers
+bend the sails and fit the rigging:—a sort of Pandemonium, it appeared to
+young Mrs. Newall, who was here on Monday and half-choked with guano; but
+it suits the likes o’ me.
+
+                                      ‘S. S. _Elba_, River Mersey: May 17.
+
+‘We are delayed in the river by some of the ship’s papers not being
+ready.  Such a scene at the dock gates.  Not a sailor will join till the
+last moment; and then, just as the ship forges ahead through the narrow
+pass, beds and baggage fly on board, the men half tipsy clutch at the
+rigging, the captain swears, the women scream and sob, the crowd cheer
+and laugh, while one or two pretty little girls stand still and cry
+outright, regardless of all eyes.
+
+‘These two days of comparative peace have quite set me on my legs again.
+I was getting worn and weary with anxiety and work.  As usual I have been
+delighted with my shipwrights.  I gave them some beer on Saturday, making
+a short oration.  To-day when they went ashore and I came on board, they
+gave three cheers, whether for me or the ship I hardly know, but I had
+just bid them good-bye, and the ship was out of hail; but I was startled
+and hardly liked to claim the compliment by acknowledging it.
+
+                                                    ‘S. S. _Elba_: May 25.
+
+‘My first intentions of a long journal have been fairly frustrated by
+sea-sickness.  On Tuesday last about noon we started from the Mersey in
+very dirty weather, and were hardly out of the river when we met a gale
+from the south-west and a heavy sea, both right in our teeth; and the
+poor _Elba_ had a sad shaking.  Had I not been very sea-sick, the sight
+would have been exciting enough, as I sat wrapped in my oilskins on the
+bridge; [but] in spite of all my efforts to talk, to eat, and to grin, I
+soon collapsed into imbecility; and I was heartily thankful towards
+evening to find myself in bed.
+
+‘Next morning, I fancied it grew quieter and, as I listened, heard, “Let
+go the anchor,” whereon I concluded we had run into Holyhead Harbour, as
+was indeed the case.  All that day we lay in Holyhead, but I could
+neither read nor write nor draw.  The captain of another steamer which
+had put in came on board, and we all went for a walk on the hill; and in
+the evening there was an exchange of presents.  We gave some tobacco I
+think, and received a cat, two pounds of fresh butter, a Cumberland ham,
+_Westward Ho_! and Thackeray’s _English Humourists_.  I was astonished at
+receiving two such fair books from the captain of a little coasting
+screw.  Our captain said he [the captain of the screw] had plenty of
+money, five or six hundred a year at least.—“What in the world makes him
+go rolling about in such a craft, then?”—“Why, I fancy he’s reckless;
+he’s desperate in love with that girl I mentioned, and she won’t look at
+him.”  Our honest, fat, old captain says this very grimly in his thick,
+broad voice.
+
+‘My head won’t stand much writing yet, so I will run up and take a look
+at the blue night sky off the coast of Portugal.
+
+                                                                  ‘May 26.
+
+‘A nice lad of some two and twenty, A— by name, goes out in a nondescript
+capacity as part purser, part telegraph clerk, part generally useful
+person.  A— was a great comfort during the miseries [of the gale]; for
+when with a dead head wind and a heavy sea, plates, books, papers,
+stomachs were being rolled about in sad confusion, we generally managed
+to lie on our backs, and grin, and try discordant staves of the _Flowers
+of the Forest_ and the _Low-backed Car_.  We could sing and laugh, when
+we could do nothing else; though A— was ready to swear after each fit was
+past, that that was the first time he had felt anything, and at this
+moment would declare in broad Scotch that he’d never been sick at all,
+qualifying the oath with “except for a minute now and then.”  He brought
+a cornet-à-piston to practice on, having had three weeks’ instructions on
+that melodious instrument; and if you could hear the horrid sounds that
+come! especially at heavy rolls.  When I hint he is not improving, there
+comes a confession: “I don’t feel quite right yet, you see!”  But he
+blows away manfully, and in self-defence I try to roar the tune louder.
+
+                                                               ‘11:30 P.M.
+
+‘Long past Cape St. Vincent now.  We went within about 400 yards of the
+cliffs and light-house in a calm moonlight, with porpoises springing from
+the sea, the men crooning long ballads as they lay idle on the forecastle
+and the sails flapping uncertain on the yards.  As we passed, there came
+a sudden breeze from land, hot and heavy scented; and now as I write its
+warm rich flavour contrasts strongly with the salt air we have been
+breathing.
+
+‘I paced the deck with H—, the second mate, and in the quiet night drew a
+confession that he was engaged to be married, and gave him a world of
+good advice.  He is a very nice, active, little fellow, with a broad
+Scotch tongue and “dirty, little rascal” appearance.  He had a sad
+disappointment at starting.  Having been second mate on the last voyage,
+when the first mate was discharged, he took charge of the _Elba_ all the
+time she was in port, and of course looked forward to being chief mate
+this trip.  Liddell promised him the post.  He had not authority to do
+this; and when Newall heard of it, he appointed another man.  Fancy poor
+H— having told all the men and most of all, his sweetheart.  But more
+remains behind; for when it came to signing articles, it turned out that
+O—, the new first mate, had not a certificate which allowed him to have a
+second mate.  Then came rather an affecting scene.  For H— proposed to
+sign as chief (he having the necessary higher certificate) but to act as
+second for the lower wages.  At first O— would not give in, but offered
+to go as second.  But our brave little H— said, no: “The owners wished
+Mr. O— to be chief mate, and chief mate he should be.”  So he carried the
+day, signed as chief and acts as second.  Shakespeare and Byron are his
+favourite books.  I walked into Byron a little, but can well understand
+his stirring up a rough, young sailor’s romance.  I lent him _Westward
+Ho_ from the cabin; but to my astonishment he did not care much for it;
+he said it smelt of the shilling railway library; perhaps I had praised
+it too highly.  Scott is his standard for novels.  I am very happy to
+find good taste by no means confined to gentlemen, H— having no
+pretensions to that title.  He is a man after my own heart.
+
+‘Then I came down to the cabin and heard young A—’s schemes for the
+future.  His highest picture is a commission in the Prince of
+Vizianagram’s irregular horse.  His eldest brother is tutor to his
+Highness’s children, and grand vizier, and magistrate, and on his
+Highness’s household staff, and seems to be one of those Scotch
+adventurers one meets with and hears of in queer berths—raising cavalry,
+building palaces, and using some petty Eastern king’s long purse with
+their long Scotch heads.
+
+                                                        ‘Off Bona; June 4.
+
+‘I read your letter carefully, leaning back in a Maltese boat to present
+the smallest surface of my body to a grilling sun, and sailing from the
+_Elba_ to Cape Hamrah about three miles distant.  How we fried and
+sighed!  At last, we reached land under Fort Genova, and I was carried
+ashore pick-a-back, and plucked the first flower I saw for Annie.  It was
+a strange scene, far more novel than I had imagined: the high, steep
+banks covered with rich, spicy vegetation of which I hardly knew one
+plant.  The dwarf palm with fan-like leaves, growing about two feet high,
+formed the staple of the verdure.  As we brushed through them, the gummy
+leaves of a cistus stuck to the clothes; and with its small white flower
+and yellow heart, stood for our English dog-rose.  In place of heather,
+we had myrtle and lentisque with leaves somewhat similar.  That large
+bulb with long flat leaves?  Do not touch it if your hands are cut; the
+Arabs use it as blisters for their horses.  Is that the same sort?  No,
+take that one up; it is the bulb of a dwarf palm, each layer of the onion
+peels off, brown and netted, like the outside of a cocoa-nut.  It is a
+clever plant that; from the leaves we get a vegetable horsehair;—and eat
+the bottom of the centre spike.  All the leaves you pull have the same
+aromatic scent.  But here a little patch of cleared ground shows old
+friends, who seem to cling by abused civilisation:—fine, hardy thistles,
+one of them bright yellow, though;—honest, Scotch-looking, large daisies
+or gowans;—potatoes here and there, looking but sickly; and dark sturdy
+fig-trees looking cool and at their ease in the burning sun.
+
+‘Here we are at Fort Genova, crowning the little point, a small old
+building, due to my old Genoese acquaintance who fought and traded
+bravely once upon a time.  A broken cannon of theirs forms the threshold;
+and through a dark, low arch, we enter upon broad terraces sloping to the
+centre, from which rain water may collect and run into that well.
+Large-breeched French troopers lounge about and are most civil; and the
+whole party sit down to breakfast in a little white-washed room, from the
+door of which the long, mountain coastline and the sparkling sea show of
+an impossible blue through the openings of a white-washed rampart.  I try
+a sea-egg, one of those prickly fellows—sea-urchins, they are called
+sometimes; the shell is of a lovely purple, and when opened, there are
+rays of yellow adhering to the inside; these I eat, but they are very
+fishy.
+
+‘We are silent and shy of one another, and soon go out to watch while
+turbaned, blue-breeched, barelegged Arabs dig holes for the land
+telegraph posts on the following principle: one man takes a pick and
+bangs lazily at the hard earth; when a little is loosened, his mate with
+a small spade lifts it on one side; and _da capo_.  They have regular
+features and look quite in place among the palms.  Our English workmen
+screw the earthenware insulators on the posts, strain the wire, and order
+Arabs about by the generic term of Johnny.  I find W— has nothing for me
+to do; and that in fact no one has anything to do.  Some instruments for
+testing have stuck at Lyons, some at Cagliari; and nothing can be done—or
+at any rate, is done.  I wander about, thinking of you and staring at
+big, green grasshoppers—locusts, some people call them—and smelling the
+rich brushwood.  There was nothing for a pencil to sketch, and I soon got
+tired of this work, though I have paid willingly much money for far less
+strange and lovely sights.
+
+                                            ‘Off Cape Spartivento: June 8.
+
+‘At two this morning, we left Cagliari; at five cast anchor here.  I got
+up and began preparing for the final trial; and shortly afterwards
+everyone else of note on board went ashore to make experiments on the
+state of the cable, leaving me with the prospect of beginning to lift at
+12 o’clock.  I was not ready by that time; but the experiments were not
+concluded and moreover the cable was found to be imbedded some four or
+five feet in sand, so that the boat could not bring off the end.  At
+three, Messrs. Liddell, &c., came on board in good spirits, having found
+two wires good or in such a state as permitted messages to be transmitted
+freely.  The boat now went to grapple for the cable some way from shore
+while the _Elba_ towed a small lateen craft which was to take back the
+consul to Cagliari some distance on its way.  On our return we found the
+boat had been unsuccessful; she was allowed to drop astern, while we
+grappled for the cable in the _Elba_ [without more success].  The coast
+is a low mountain range covered with brushwood or heather—pools of water
+and a sandy beach at their feet.  I have not yet been ashore, my hands
+having been very full all day.
+
+                                                                  ‘June 9.
+
+‘Grappling for the cable outside the bank had been voted too uncertain;
+[and the day was spent in] efforts to pull the cable off through the sand
+which has accumulated over it.  By getting the cable tight on to the
+boat, and letting the swell pitch her about till it got slack, and then
+tightening again with blocks and pulleys, we managed to get out from the
+beach towards the ship at the rate of about twenty yards an hour.  When
+they had got about 100 yards from shore, we ran round in the _Elba_ to
+try and help them, letting go the anchor in the shallowest possible
+water, this was about sunset.  Suddenly someone calls out he sees the
+cable at the bottom: there it was sure enough, apparently wriggling about
+as the waves rippled.  Great excitement; still greater when we find our
+own anchor is foul of it and has been the means of bringing it to light.
+We let go a grapnel, get the cable clear of the anchor on to the
+grapnel—the captain in an agony lest we should drift ashore
+meanwhile—hand the grappling line into the big boat, steam out far
+enough, and anchor again.  A little more work and one end of the cable is
+up over the bows round my drum.  I go to my engine and we start hauling
+in.  All goes pretty well, but it is quite dark.  Lamps are got at last,
+and men arranged.  We go on for a quarter of a mile or so from shore and
+then stop at about half-past nine with orders to be up at three.  Grand
+work at last!  A number of the _Saturday Review_ here; it reads so hot
+and feverish, so tomblike and unhealthy, in the midst of dear Nature’s
+hills and sea, with good wholesome work to do.  Pray that all go well
+to-morrow.
+
+                                                                 ‘June 10.
+
+‘Thank heaven for a most fortunate day.  At three o’clock this morning in
+a damp, chill mist all hands were roused to work.  With a small delay,
+for one or two improvements I had seen to be necessary last night, the
+engine started and since that time I do not think there has been half an
+hour’s stoppage.  A rope to splice, a block to change, a wheel to oil, an
+old rusted anchor to disengage from the cable which brought it up, these
+have been our only obstructions.  Sixty, seventy, eighty, a hundred, a
+hundred and twenty revolutions at last, my little engine tears away.  The
+even black rope comes straight out of the blue heaving water: passes
+slowly round an open-hearted, good-tempered looking pulley, five feet
+diameter; aft past a vicious nipper, to bring all up should anything go
+wrong; through a gentle guide; on to a huge bluff drum, who wraps him
+round his body and says “Come you must,” as plain as drum can speak: the
+chattering pauls say “I’ve got him, I’ve got him, he can’t get back:”
+whilst black cable, much slacker and easier in mind and body, is taken by
+a slim V-pulley and passed down into the huge hold, where half a dozen
+men put him comfortably to bed after his exertion in rising from his long
+bath.  In good sooth, it is one of the strangest sights I know to see
+that black fellow rising up so steadily in the midst of the blue sea.  We
+are more than half way to the place where we expect the fault; and
+already the one wire, supposed previously to be quite bad near the
+African coast, can be spoken through.  I am very glad I am here, for my
+machines are my own children and I look on their little failings with a
+parent’s eye and lead them into the path of duty with gentleness and
+firmness.  I am naturally in good spirits, but keep very quiet, for
+misfortunes may arise at any instant; moreover to-morrow my paying-out
+apparatus will be wanted should all go well, and that will be another
+nervous operation.  Fifteen miles are safely in; but no one knows better
+than I do that nothing is done till all is done.
+
+                                                                 ‘June 11.
+
+‘9 A.M.—We have reached the splice supposed to be faulty, and no fault
+has been found.  The two men learned in electricity, L— and W—, squabble
+where the fault is.
+
+‘_Evening_.—A weary day in a hot broiling sun; no air.  After the
+experiments, L— said the fault might be ten miles ahead: by that time, we
+should be according to a chart in about a thousand fathoms of
+water—rather more than a mile.  It was most difficult to decide whether
+to go on or not.  I made preparations for a heavy pull, set small things
+to rights and went to sleep.  About four in the afternoon, Mr. Liddell
+decided to proceed, and we are now (at seven) grinding it in at the rate
+of a mile and three-quarters per hour, which appears a grand speed to us.
+If the paying-out only works well!  I have just thought of a great
+improvement in it; I can’t apply it this time, however.—The sea is of an
+oily calm, and a perfect fleet of brigs and ships surrounds us, their
+sails hardly filling in the lazy breeze.  The sun sets behind the dim
+coast of the Isola San Pietro, the coast of Sardinia high and rugged
+becomes softer and softer in the distance, while to the westward still
+the isolated rock of Toro springs from the horizon.—It would amuse you to
+see how cool (in head) and jolly everybody is.  A testy word now and then
+shows the wires are strained a little, but everyone laughs and makes his
+little jokes as if it were all in fun: yet we are all as much in earnest
+as the most earnest of the earnest bastard German school or demonstrative
+of Frenchmen.  I enjoy it very much.
+
+                                                                 ‘June 12.
+
+‘5.30 A.M.—Out of sight of land: about thirty nautical miles in the hold;
+the wind rising a little; experiments being made for a fault, while the
+engine slowly revolves to keep us hanging at the same spot: depth
+supposed about a mile.  The machinery has behaved admirably.  Oh! that
+the paying-out were over!  The new machinery there is but rough, meant
+for an experiment in shallow water, and here we are in a mile of water.
+
+‘6.30.—I have made my calculations and find the new paying-out gear
+cannot possibly answer at this depth, some portion would give way.
+Luckily, I have brought the old things with me and am getting them rigged
+up as fast as may be.  Bad news from the cable.  Number four has given in
+some portion of the last ten miles: the fault in number three is still at
+the bottom of the sea: number two is now the only good wire and the hold
+is getting in such a mess, through keeping bad bits out and cutting for
+splicing and testing, that there will be great risk in paying out.  The
+cable is somewhat strained in its ascent from one mile below us; what it
+will be when we get to two miles is a problem we may have to determine.
+
+‘9 P.M.—A most provoking unsatisfactory day.  We have done nothing.  The
+wind and sea have both risen.  Too little notice has been given to the
+telegraphists who accompany this expedition; they had to leave all their
+instruments at Lyons in order to arrive at Bona in time; our tests are
+therefore of the roughest, and no one really knows where the faults are.
+Mr. L— in the morning lost much time; then he told us, after we had been
+inactive for about eight hours, that the fault in number three was within
+six miles; and at six o’clock in the evening, when all was ready for a
+start to pick up these six miles, he comes and says there must be a fault
+about thirty miles from Bona!  By this time it was too late to begin
+paying out to-day, and we must lie here moored in a thousand fathoms till
+light to-morrow morning.  The ship pitches a good deal, but the wind is
+going down.
+
+                                                         ‘June 13, Sunday.
+
+‘The wind has not gone down, however.  It now (at 10.30) blows a pretty
+stiff gale, the sea has also risen; and the _Elba’s_ bows rise and fall
+about 9 feet.  We make twelve pitches to the minute, and the poor cable
+must feel very sea-sick by this time.  We are quite unable to do
+anything, and continue riding at anchor in one thousand fathoms, the
+engines going constantly so as to keep the ship’s bows up to the cable,
+which by this means hangs nearly vertical and sustains no strain but that
+caused by its own weight and the pitching of the vessel.  We were all up
+at four, but the weather entirely forbade work for to-day, so some went
+to bed and most lay down, making up our leeway as we nautically term our
+loss of sleep.  I must say Liddell is a fine fellow and keeps his
+patience and temper wonderfully; and yet how he does fret and fume about
+trifles at home!  This wind has blown now for 36 hours, and yet we have
+telegrams from Bona to say the sea there is as calm as a mirror.  It
+makes one laugh to remember one is still tied to the shore.  Click,
+click, click, the pecker is at work: I wonder what Herr P— says to Herr
+L—,—tests, tests, tests, nothing more.  This will be a very anxious day.
+
+                                                                 ‘June 14.
+
+‘Another day of fatal inaction.
+
+                                                                 ‘June 15.
+
+‘9.30.—The wind has gone down a deal; but even now there are doubts
+whether we shall start to-day.  When shall I get back to you?
+
+‘9 P.M.—Four miles from land.  Our run has been successful and eventless.
+Now the work is nearly over I feel a little out of spirits—why, I should
+be puzzled to say—mere wantonness, or reaction perhaps after suspense.
+
+                                                                 ‘June 16.
+
+‘Up this morning at three, coupled my self-acting gear to the brake and
+had the satisfaction of seeing it pay out the last four miles in very
+good style.  With one or two little improvements, I hope to make it a
+capital thing.  The end has just gone ashore in two boats, three out of
+four wires good.  Thus ends our first expedition.  By some odd chance a
+_Times_ of June the 7th has found its way on board through the agency of
+a wretched old peasant who watches the end of the line here.  A long
+account of breakages in the Atlantic trial trip.  To-night we grapple for
+the heavy cable, eight tons to the mile.  I long to have a tug at him; he
+may puzzle me, and though misfortunes or rather difficulties are a bore
+at the time, life when working with cables is tame without them.
+
+‘2 P.M.—Hurrah, he is hooked, the big fellow, almost at the first cast.
+He hangs under our bows looking so huge and imposing that I could find it
+in my heart to be afraid of him.
+
+                                                                 ‘June 17.
+
+‘We went to a little bay called Chia, where a fresh-water stream falls
+into the sea, and took in water.  This is rather a long operation, so I
+went a walk up the valley with Mr. Liddell.  The coast here consists of
+rocky mountains 800 to 1,000 feet high covered with shrubs of a brilliant
+green.  On landing our first amusement was watching the hundreds of large
+fish who lazily swam in shoals about the river; the big canes on the
+further side hold numberless tortoises, we are told, but see none, for
+just now they prefer taking a siesta.  A little further on, and what is
+this with large pink flowers in such abundance?—the oleander in full
+flower.  At first I fear to pluck them, thinking they must be cultivated
+and valuable; but soon the banks show a long line of thick tall shrubs,
+one mass of glorious pink and green.  Set these in a little valley,
+framed by mountains whose rocks gleam out blue and purple colours such as
+pre-Raphaelites only dare attempt, shining out hard and weird-like
+amongst the clumps of castor-oil plants, cistus, arbor vitæ and many
+other evergreens, whose names, alas! I know not; the cistus is brown now,
+the rest all deep or brilliant green.  Large herds of cattle browse on
+the baked deposit at the foot of these large crags.  One or two
+half-savage herdsmen in sheepskin kilts, &c., ask for cigars; partridges
+whirr up on either side of us; pigeons coo and nightingales sing amongst
+the blooming oleander.  We get six sheep and many fowls, too, from the
+priest of the small village; and then run back to Spartivento and make
+preparations for the morning.
+
+                                                                 ‘June 18.
+
+‘The big cable is stubborn and will not behave like his smaller brother.
+The gear employed to take him off the drum is not strong enough; he gets
+slack on the drum and plays the mischief.  Luckily for my own conscience,
+the gear I had wanted was negatived by Mr. Newall.  Mr. Liddell does not
+exactly blame me, but he says we might have had a silver pulley cheaper
+than the cost of this delay.  He has telegraphed for more men to
+Cagliari, to try to pull the cable off the drum into the hold, by hand.
+I look as comfortable as I can, but feel as if people were blaming me.  I
+am trying my best to get something rigged which may help us; I wanted a
+little difficulty, and feel much better.—The short length we have picked
+up was covered at places with beautiful sprays of coral, twisted and
+twined with shells of those small, fairy animals we saw in the aquarium
+at home; poor little things, they died at once, with their little bells
+and delicate bright tints.
+
+‘12 _o’clock_.—Hurrah, victory! for the present anyhow.  Whilst in our
+first dejection, I thought I saw a place where a flat roller would remedy
+the whole misfortune; but a flat roller at Cape Spartivento, hard, easily
+unshipped, running freely!  There was a grooved pulley used for the
+paying-out machinery with a spindle wheel, which might suit me.  I filled
+him up with tarry spunyarn, nailed sheet copper round him, bent some
+parts in the fire; and we are paying-in without more trouble now.  You
+would think some one would praise me; no, no more praise than blame
+before; perhaps now they think better of me, though.
+
+‘10 P.M.—We have gone on very comfortably for nearly six miles.  An hour
+and a half was spent washing down; for along with many coloured polypi,
+from corals, shells and insects, the big cable brings up much mud and
+rust, and makes a fishy smell by no means pleasant: the bottom seems to
+teem with life.—But now we are startled by a most unpleasant, grinding
+noise; which appeared at first to come from the large low pulley, but
+when the engines stopped, the noise continued; and we now imagine it is
+something slipping down the cable, and the pulley but acts as
+sounding-board to the big fiddle.  Whether it is only an anchor or one of
+the two other cables, we know not.  We hope it is not the cable just laid
+down.
+
+                                                                 ‘June 19.
+
+‘10 A.M.—All our alarm groundless, it would appear: the odd noise ceased
+after a time, and there was no mark sufficiently strong on the large
+cable to warrant the suspicion that we had cut another line through.  I
+stopped up on the look-out till three in the morning, which made 23 hours
+between sleep and sleep.  One goes dozing about, though, most of the day,
+for it is only when something goes wrong that one has to look alive.
+Hour after hour, I stand on the forecastle-head, picking off little
+specimens of polypi and coral, or lie on the saloon deck reading back
+numbers of the _Times_—till something hitches, and then all is
+hurly-burly once more.  There are awnings all along the ship, and a most
+ancient, fish-like smell beneath.
+
+‘1 _o’clock_.—Suddenly a great strain in only 95 fathoms of water—belts
+surging and general dismay; grapnels being thrown out in the hope of
+finding what holds the cable.—Should it prove the young cable!  We are
+apparently crossing its path—not the working one, but the lost child; Mr.
+Liddell _would_ start the big one first though it was laid first: he
+wanted to see the job done, and meant to leave us to the small one
+unaided by his presence.
+
+‘3.30.—Grapnel caught something, lost it again; it left its marks on the
+prongs.  Started lifting gear again; and after hauling in some 50
+fathoms—grunt, grunt, grunt—we hear the other cable slipping down our big
+one, playing the selfsame tune we heard last night—louder, however.
+
+‘10 P.M.—The pull on the deck engines became harder and harder.  I got
+steam up in a boiler on deck, and another little engine starts hauling at
+the grapnel.  I wonder if there ever was such a scene of confusion: Mr.
+Liddell and W— and the captain all giving orders contradictory, &c., on
+the forecastle; D—, the foreman of our men, the mates, &c., following the
+example of our superiors; the ship’s engine and boilers below, a 50-horse
+engine on deck, a boiler 14 feet long on deck beside it, a little steam
+winch tearing round; a dozen Italians (20 have come to relieve our hands,
+the men we telegraphed for to Cagliari) hauling at the rope; wiremen,
+sailors, in the crevices left by ropes and machinery; everything that
+could swear swearing—I found myself swearing like a trooper at last.  We
+got the unknown difficulty within ten fathoms of the surface; but then
+the forecastle got frightened that, if it was the small cable which we
+had got hold of, we should certainly break it by continuing the
+tremendous and increasing strain.  So at last Mr. Liddell decided to
+stop; cut the big cable, buoying its end; go back to our pleasant
+watering-place at Chia, take more water and start lifting the small
+cable.  The end of the large one has even now regained its sandy bed; and
+three buoys—one to grapnel foul of the supposed small cable, two to the
+big cable—are dipping about on the surface.  One more—a flag-buoy—will
+soon follow, and then straight for shore.
+
+                                                                 ‘June 20.
+
+‘It is an ill-wind, &c.  I have an unexpected opportunity of forwarding
+this engineering letter; for the craft which brought out our Italian
+sailors must return to Cagliari to-night, as the little cable will take
+us nearly to Galita, and the Italian skipper could hardly find his way
+from thence.  To-day—Sunday—not much rest.  Mr. Liddell is at Spartivento
+telegraphing.  We are at Chia, and shall shortly go to help our boat’s
+crew in getting the small cable on board.  We dropped them some time
+since in order that they might dig it out of the sand as far as possible.
+
+                                                                 ‘June 21.
+
+‘Yesterday—Sunday as it was—all hands were kept at work all day, coaling,
+watering, and making a futile attempt to pull the cable from the shore on
+board through the sand.  This attempt was rather silly after the
+experience we had gained at Cape Spartivento.  This morning we grappled,
+hooked the cable at once, and have made an excellent start.  Though I
+have called this the small cable, it is much larger than the Bona
+one.—Here comes a break down and a bad one.
+
+                                                                 ‘June 22.
+
+‘We got over it, however; but it is a warning to me that my future
+difficulties will arise from parts wearing out.  Yesterday the cable was
+often a lovely sight, coming out of the water one large incrustation of
+delicate, net-like corals and long, white curling shells.  No portion of
+the dirty black wires was visible; instead we had a garland of soft pink
+with little scarlet sprays and white enamel intermixed.  All was fragile,
+however, and could hardly be secured in safety; and inexorable iron
+crushed the tender leaves to atoms.—This morning at the end of my watch,
+about 4 o’clock, we came to the buoys, proving our anticipations right
+concerning the crossing of the cables.  I went to bed for four hours, and
+on getting up, found a sad mess.  A tangle of the six-wire cable hung to
+the grapnel which had been left buoyed, and the small cable had parted
+and is lost for the present.  Our hauling of the other day must have done
+the mischief.
+
+                                                                 ‘June 23.
+
+‘We contrived to get the two ends of the large cable and to pick the
+short end up.  The long end, leading us seaward, was next put round the
+drum and a mile of it picked up; but then, fearing another tangle, the
+end was cut and buoyed, and we returned to grapple for the three-wire
+cable.  All this is very tiresome for me.  The buoying and dredging are
+managed entirely by W—, who has had much experience in this sort of
+thing; so I have not enough to do and get very homesick.  At noon the
+wind freshened and the sea rose so high that we had to run for land and
+are once more this evening anchored at Chia.
+
+                                                                 ‘June 24.
+
+‘The whole day spent in dredging without success.  This operation
+consists in allowing the ship to drift slowly across the line where you
+expect the cable to be, while at the end of a long rope, fast either to
+the bow or stern, a grapnel drags along the ground.  This grapnel is a
+small anchor, made like four pot-hooks tied back to back.  When the rope
+gets taut, the ship is stopped and the grapnel hauled up to the surface
+in the hopes of finding the cable on its prongs.—I am much discontented
+with myself for idly lounging about and reading _Westward Ho_! for the
+second time, instead of taking to electricity or picking up nautical
+information.  I am uncommonly idle.  The sea is not quite so rough, but
+the weather is squally and the rain comes in frequent gusts.
+
+                                                                 ‘June 25.
+
+‘To-day about 1 o’clock we hooked the three-wire cable, buoyed the long
+sea end, and picked up the short [or shore] end.  Now it is dark and we
+must wait for morning before lifting the buoy we lowered to-day and
+proceeding seawards.—The depth of water here is about 600 feet, the
+height of a respectable English hill; our fishing line was about a
+quarter of a mile long.  It blows pretty fresh, and there is a great deal
+of sea.
+
+                                                                    ‘26th.
+
+‘This morning it came on to blow so heavily that it was impossible to
+take up our buoy.  The _Elba_ recommenced rolling in true Baltic style
+and towards noon we ran for land.
+
+                                                            ‘27th, Sunday.
+
+‘This morning was a beautiful calm.  We reached the buoys at about 4.30
+and commenced picking up at 6.30.  Shortly a new cause of anxiety arose.
+Kinks came up in great quantities, about thirty in the hour.  To have a
+true conception of a kink, you must see one: it is a loop drawn tight,
+all the wires get twisted and the gutta-percha inside pushed out.  These
+much diminish the value of the cable, as they must all be cut out, the
+gutta-percha made good, and the cable spliced.  They arise from the cable
+having been badly laid down so that it forms folds and tails at the
+bottom of the sea.  These kinks have another disadvantage: they weaken
+the cable very much.—At about six o’clock [P.M.] we had some twelve miles
+lifted, when I went to the bows; the kinks were exceedingly tight and
+were giving way in a most alarming manner.  I got a cage rigged up to
+prevent the end (if it broke) from hurting anyone, and sat down on the
+bowsprit, thinking I should describe kinks to Annie:—suddenly I saw a
+great many coils and kinks altogether at the surface.  I jumped to the
+gutta-percha pipe, by blowing through which the signal is given to stop
+the engine.  I blow, but the engine does not stop; again—no answer: the
+coils and kinks jam in the bows and I rush aft shouting stop.  Too late:
+the cable had parted and must lie in peace at the bottom.  Someone had
+pulled the gutta-percha tube across a bare part of the steam pipe and
+melted it.  It had been used hundreds of times in the last few days and
+gave no symptoms of failing.  I believe the cable must have gone at any
+rate; however, since it went in my watch and since I might have secured
+the tubing more strongly, I feel rather sad. . . .
+
+                                                                 ‘June 28.
+
+‘Since I could not go to Annie I took down Shakespeare, and by the time I
+had finished _Antony and Cleopatra_, read the second half of _Troilus_
+and got some way in _Coriolanus_, I felt it was childish to regret the
+accident had happened in my watch, and moreover I felt myself not much to
+blame in the tubing matter—it had been torn down, it had not fallen down;
+so I went to bed, and slept without fretting, and woke this morning in
+the same good mood—for which thank you and our friend Shakespeare.  I am
+happy to say Mr. Liddell said the loss of the cable did not much matter;
+though this would have been no consolation had I felt myself to
+blame.—This morning we have grappled for and found another length of
+small cable which Mr. — dropped in 100 fathoms of water.  If this also
+gets full of kinks, we shall probably have to cut it after 10 miles or
+so, or more probably still it will part of its own free will or weight.
+
+‘10 P.M.—This second length of three-wire cable soon got into the same
+condition as its fellow—i.e. came up twenty kinks an hour—and after seven
+miles were in, parted on the pulley over the bows at one of the said
+kinks; during my watch again, but this time no earthly power could have
+saved it.  I had taken all manner of precautions to prevent the end doing
+any damage when the smash came, for come I knew it must.  We now return
+to the six-wire cable.  As I sat watching the cable to-night, large
+phosphorescent globes kept rolling from it and fading in the black water.
+
+                                                                    ‘29th.
+
+‘To-day we returned to the buoy we had left at the end of the six-wire
+cable, and after much trouble from a series of tangles, got a fair start
+at noon.  You will easily believe a tangle of iron rope inch and a half
+diameter is not easy to unravel, especially with a ton or so hanging to
+the ends.  It is now eight o’clock and we have about six and a half miles
+safe: it becomes very exciting, however, for the kinks are coming fast
+and furious.
+
+                                                                  ‘July 2.
+
+‘Twenty-eight miles safe in the hold.  The ship is now so deep, that the
+men are to be turned out of their aft hold, and the remainder coiled
+there; so the good _Elba’s_ nose need not burrow too far into the waves.
+There can only be about 10 or 12 miles more, but these weigh 80 or 100
+tons.
+
+                                                                  ‘July 5.
+
+‘Our first mate was much hurt in securing a buoy on the evening of the
+2nd.  As interpreter [with the Italians] I am useful in all these cases;
+but for no fortune would I be a doctor to witness these scenes
+continually.  Pain is a terrible thing.—Our work is done: the whole of
+the six-wire cable has been recovered; only a small part of the
+three-wire, but that wire was bad and, owing to its twisted state, the
+value small.  We may therefore be said to have been very successful.’
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+I have given this cruise nearly in full.  From the notes, unhappily
+imperfect, of two others, I will take only specimens; for in all there
+are features of similarity and it is possible to have too much even of
+submarine telegraphy and the romance of engineering.  And first from the
+cruise of 1859 in the Greek Islands and to Alexandria, take a few traits,
+incidents and pictures.
+
+                                                            ‘May 10, 1859.
+
+‘We had a fair wind and we did very well, seeing a little bit of Cerig or
+Cythera, and lots of turtle-doves wandering about over the sea and
+perching, tired and timid, in the rigging of our little craft.  Then
+Falconera, Antimilo, and Milo, topped with huge white clouds, barren,
+deserted, rising bold and mysterious from the blue, chafing
+sea;—Argentiera, Siphano, Scapho, Paros, Antiparos, and late at night
+Syra itself.  _Adam Bede_ in one hand, a sketch-book in the other, lying
+on rugs under an awning, I enjoyed a very pleasant day.
+
+                                                                  ‘May 14.
+
+‘Syra is semi-eastern.  The pavement, huge shapeless blocks sloping to a
+central gutter; from this bare two-storied houses, sometimes plaster many
+coloured, sometimes rough-hewn marble, rise, dirty and ill-finished to
+straight, plain, flat roofs; shops guiltless of windows, with signs in
+Greek letters; dogs, Greeks in blue, baggy, Zouave breeches and a fez, a
+few narghilehs and a sprinkling of the ordinary continental shopboys.—In
+the evening I tried one more walk in Syra with A—, but in vain
+endeavoured to amuse myself or to spend money; the first effort resulting
+in singing _Doodah_ to a passing Greek or two, the second in spending,
+no, in making A— spend, threepence on coffee for three.
+
+                                                                  ‘May 16.
+
+‘On coming on deck, I found we were at anchor in Canea bay, and saw one
+of the most lovely sights man could witness.  Far on either hand stretch
+bold mountain capes, Spada and Maleka, tender in colour, bold in outline;
+rich sunny levels lie beneath them, framed by the azure sea.  Right in
+front, a dark brown fortress girdles white mosques and minarets.  Rich
+and green, our mountain capes here join to form a setting for the town,
+in whose dark walls—still darker—open a dozen high-arched caves in which
+the huge Venetian galleys used to lie in wait.  High above all, higher
+and higher yet, up into the firmament, range after range of blue and
+snow-capped mountains.  I was bewildered and amazed, having heard nothing
+of this great beauty.  The town when entered is quite eastern.  The
+streets are formed of open stalls under the first story, in which squat
+tailors, cooks, sherbet vendors and the like, busy at their work or
+smoking narghilehs.  Cloths stretched from house to house keep out the
+sun.  Mules rattle through the crowd; curs yelp between your legs;
+negroes are as hideous and bright clothed as usual; grave Turks with long
+chibouques continue to march solemnly without breaking them; a little
+Arab in one dirty rag pokes fun at two splendid little Turks with
+brilliant fezzes; wiry mountaineers in dirty, full, white kilts,
+shouldering long guns and one hand on their pistols, stalk untamed past a
+dozen Turkish soldiers, who look sheepish and brutal in worn cloth jacket
+and cotton trousers.  A headless, wingless lion of St. Mark still stands
+upon a gate, and has left the mark of his strong clutch.  Of ancient
+times when Crete was Crete, not a trace remains; save perhaps in the
+full, well-cut nostril and firm tread of that mountaineer, and I suspect
+that even his sires were Albanians, mere outer barbarians.
+
+                                                                  ‘May 17.
+
+I spent the day at the little station where the cable was landed, which
+has apparently been first a Venetian monastery and then a Turkish mosque.
+At any rate the big dome is very cool, and the little ones hold [our
+electric] batteries capitally.  A handsome young Bashibazouk guards it,
+and a still handsomer mountaineer is the servant; so I draw them and the
+monastery and the hill, till I’m black in the face with heat and come on
+board to hear the Canea cable is still bad.
+
+                                                                  ‘May 23.
+
+‘We arrived in the morning at the east end of Candia, and had a glorious
+scramble over the mountains which seem built of adamant.  Time has worn
+away the softer portions of the rock, only leaving sharp jagged edges of
+steel.  Sea eagles soaring above our heads; old tanks, ruins, and
+desolation at our feet.  The ancient Arsinoe stood here; a few blocks of
+marble with the cross attest the presence of Venetian Christians; but
+now—the desolation of desolations.  Mr. Liddell and I separated from the
+rest, and when we had found a sure bay for the cable, had a tremendous
+lively scramble back to the boat.  These are the bits of our life which I
+enjoy, which have some poetry, some grandeur in them.
+
+                                                              ‘May 29 (?).
+
+‘Yesterday we ran round to the new harbour [of Alexandria], landed the
+shore end of the cable close to Cleopatra’s bath, and made a very
+satisfactory start about one in the afternoon.  We had scarcely gone 200
+yards when I noticed that the cable ceased to run out, and I wondered why
+the ship had stopped.  People ran aft to tell me not to put such a strain
+on the cable; I answered indignantly that there was no strain; and
+suddenly it broke on every one in the ship at once that we were aground.
+Here was a nice mess.  A violent scirocco blew from the land; making
+one’s skin feel as if it belonged to some one else and didn’t fit, making
+the horizon dim and yellow with fine sand, oppressing every sense and
+raising the thermometer 20 degrees in an hour, but making calm water
+round us which enabled the ship to lie for the time in safety.  The wind
+might change at any moment, since the scirocco was only accidental; and
+at the first wave from seaward bump would go the poor ship, and there
+would [might] be an end of our voyage.  The captain, without waiting to
+sound, began to make an effort to put the ship over what was supposed to
+be a sandbank; but by the time soundings were made, this was found to be
+impossible, and he had only been jamming the poor _Elba_ faster on a
+rock.  Now every effort was made to get her astern, an anchor taken out,
+a rope brought to a winch I had for the cable, and the engines backed;
+but all in vain.  A small Turkish Government steamer, which is to be our
+consort, came to our assistance, but of course very slowly, and much time
+was occupied before we could get a hawser to her.  I could do no good
+after having made a chart of the soundings round the ship, and went at
+last on to the bridge to sketch the scene.  But at that moment the strain
+from the winch and a jerk from the Turkish steamer got off the boat,
+after we had been some hours aground.  The carpenter reported that she
+had made only two inches of water in one compartment; the cable was still
+uninjured astern, and our spirits rose; when, will you believe it? after
+going a short distance astern, the pilot ran us once more fast aground on
+what seemed to me nearly the same spot.  The very same scene was gone
+through as on the first occasion, and dark came on whilst the wind
+shifted, and we were still aground.  Dinner was served up, but poor Mr.
+Liddell could eat very little; and bump, bump, grind, grind, went the
+ship fifteen or sixteen times as we sat at dinner.  The slight sea,
+however, did enable us to bump off.  This morning we appear not to have
+suffered in any way; but a sea is rolling in, which a few hours ago would
+have settled the poor old _Elba_.
+
+                                                                  ‘June —.
+
+‘The Alexandria cable has again failed; after paying out two-thirds of
+the distance successfully, an unlucky touch in deep water snapped the
+line.  Luckily the accident occurred in Mr. Liddell’s watch.  Though
+personally it may not really concern me, the accident weighs like a
+personal misfortune.  Still I am glad I was present: a failure is
+probably more instructive than a success; and this experience may enable
+us to avoid misfortune in still greater undertakings.
+
+                                                                  ‘June —.
+
+‘We left Syra the morning after our arrival on Saturday the 4th.  This we
+did (first) because we were in a hurry to do something and (second)
+because, coming from Alexandria, we had four days’ quarantine to perform.
+We were all mustered along the side while the doctor counted us; the
+letters were popped into a little tin box and taken away to be smoked;
+the guardians put on board to see that we held no communication with the
+shore—without them we should still have had four more days’ quarantine;
+and with twelve Greek sailors besides, we started merrily enough picking
+up the Canea cable. . . . To our utter dismay, the yarn covering began to
+come up quite decayed, and the cable, which when laid should have borne
+half a ton, was now in danger of snapping with a tenth part of that
+strain.  We went as slow as possible in fear of a break at every instant.
+My watch was from eight to twelve in the morning, and during that time we
+had barely secured three miles of cable.  Once it broke inside the ship,
+but I seized hold of it in time—the weight being hardly anything—and the
+line for the nonce was saved.  Regular nooses were then planted inboard
+with men to draw them taut, should the cable break inboard.  A—, who
+should have relieved me, was unwell, so I had to continue my look-out;
+and about one o’clock the line again parted, but was again caught in the
+last noose, with about four inches to spare.  Five minutes afterwards it
+again parted and was yet once more caught.  Mr. Liddell (whom I had
+called) could stand this no longer; so we buoyed the line and ran into a
+bay in Siphano, waiting for calm weather, though I was by no means of
+opinion that the slight sea and wind had been the cause of our
+failures.—All next day (Monday) we lay off Siphano, amusing ourselves on
+shore with fowling pieces and navy revolvers.  I need not say we killed
+nothing; and luckily we did not wound any of ourselves.  A guardiano
+accompanied us, his functions being limited to preventing actual contact
+with the natives, for they might come as near and talk as much as they
+pleased.  These isles of Greece are sad, interesting places.  They are
+not really barren all over, but they are quite destitute of verdure; and
+tufts of thyme, wild mastic or mint, though they sound well, are not
+nearly so pretty as grass.  Many little churches, glittering white, dot
+the islands; most of them, I believe, abandoned during the whole year
+with the exception of one day sacred to their patron saint.  The villages
+are mean, but the inhabitants do not look wretched and the men are good
+sailors.  There is something in this Greek race yet; they will become a
+powerful Levantine nation in the course of time.—What a lovely moonlight
+evening that was! the barren island cutting the clear sky with fantastic
+outline, marble cliffs on either hand fairly gleaming over the calm sea.
+Next day, the wind still continuing, I proposed a boating excursion and
+decoyed A—, L—, and S— into accompanying me.  We took the little gig, and
+sailed away merrily enough round a point to a beautiful white bay,
+flanked with two glistening little churches, fronted by beautiful distant
+islands; when suddenly, to my horror, I discovered the _Elba_ steaming
+full speed out from the island.  Of course we steered after her; but the
+wind that instant ceased, and we were left in a dead calm.  There was
+nothing for it but to unship the mast, get out the oars and pull.  The
+ship was nearly certain to stop at the buoy; and I wanted to learn how to
+take an oar, so here was a chance with a vengeance!  L— steered, and we
+three pulled—a broiling pull it was about half way across to
+Palikandro—still we did come in, pulling an uncommon good stroke, and I
+had learned to hang on my oar.  L— had pressed me to let him take my
+place; but though I was very tired at the end of the first quarter of an
+hour, and then every successive half hour, I would not give in.  I nearly
+paid dear for my obstinacy, however; for in the evening I had alternate
+fits of shivering and burning.’
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+The next extracts, and I am sorry to say the last, are from Fleeming’s
+letters of 1860, when he was back at Bona and Spartivento and for the
+first time at the head of an expedition.  Unhappily these letters are not
+only the last, but the series is quite imperfect; and this is the more to
+be lamented as he had now begun to use a pen more skilfully, and in the
+following notes there is at times a touch of real distinction in the
+manner.
+
+                                               ‘Cagliari: October 5, 1860.
+
+‘All Tuesday I spent examining what was on board the _Elba_, and trying
+to start the repairs of the Spartivento land line, which has been
+entirely neglected, and no wonder, for no one has been paid for three
+months, no, not even the poor guards who have to keep themselves, their
+horses and their families, on their pay.  Wednesday morning, I started
+for Spartivento and got there in time to try a good many experiments.
+Spartivento looks more wild and savage than ever, but is not without a
+strange deadly beauty: the hills covered with bushes of a metallic green
+with coppery patches of soil in between; the valleys filled with dry salt
+mud and a little stagnant water; where that very morning the deer had
+drunk, where herons, curlews, and other fowl abound, and where, alas!
+malaria is breeding with this rain. (No fear for those who do not sleep
+on shore.)  A little iron hut had been placed there since 1858; but the
+windows had been carried off, the door broken down, the roof pierced all
+over.  In it, we sat to make experiments; and how it recalled Birkenhead!
+There was Thomson, there was my testing board, the strings of
+gutta-percha; Harry P— even, battering with the batteries; but where was
+my darling Annie?  Whilst I sat feet in sand, with Harry alone inside the
+hut—mats, coats, and wood to darken the window—the others visited the
+murderous old friar, who is of the order of Scaloppi, and for whom I
+brought a letter from his superior, ordering him to pay us attention; but
+he was away from home, gone to Cagliari in a boat with the produce of the
+farm belonging to his convent.  Then they visited the tower of Chia, but
+could not get in because the door is thirty feet off the ground; so they
+came back and pitched a magnificent tent which I brought from the
+_Bahiana_ a long time ago—and where they will live (if I mistake not) in
+preference to the friar’s, or the owl- and bat-haunted tower.  MM. T— and
+S— will be left there: T—, an intelligent, hard-working Frenchman, with
+whom I am well pleased; he can speak English and Italian well, and has
+been two years at Genoa.  S— is a French German with a face like an
+ancient Gaul, who has been sergeant-major in the French line and who is,
+I see, a great, big, muscular _fainéant_.  We left the tent pitched and
+some stores in charge of a guide, and ran back to Cagliari.
+
+‘Certainly, being at the head of things is pleasanter than being
+subordinate.  We all agree very well; and I have made the testing office
+into a kind of private room where I can come and write to you
+undisturbed, surrounded by my dear, bright brass things which all of them
+remind me of our nights at Birkenhead.  Then I can work here, too, and
+try lots of experiments; you know how I like that! and now and then I
+read—Shakespeare principally.  Thank you so much for making me bring him:
+I think I must get a pocket edition of Hamlet and Henry the Fifth, so as
+never to be without them.
+
+                                                     ‘Cagliari: October 7.
+
+‘[The town was full?] . . . of red-shirted English Garibaldini.  A very
+fine looking set of fellows they are, too: the officers rather raffish,
+but with medals Crimean and Indian; the men a very sturdy set, with many
+lads of good birth I should say.  They still wait their consort the
+Emperor and will, I fear, be too late to do anything.  I meant to have
+called on them, but they are all gone into barracks some way from the
+town, and I have been much too busy to go far.
+
+‘The view from the ramparts was very strange and beautiful.  Cagliari
+rises on a very steep rock, at the mouth of a wide plain circled by large
+hills and three-quarters filled with lagoons; it looks, therefore, like
+an old island citadel.  Large heaps of salt mark the border between the
+sea and the lagoons; thousands of flamingoes whiten the centre of the
+huge shallow marsh; hawks hover and scream among the trees under the high
+mouldering battlements.—A little lower down, the band played.  Men and
+ladies bowed and pranced, the costumes posed, church bells tinkled,
+processions processed, the sun set behind thick clouds capping the hills;
+I pondered on you and enjoyed it all.
+
+‘Decidedly I prefer being master to being man: boats at all hours,
+stewards flying for marmalade, captain enquiring when ship is to sail,
+clerks to copy my writing, the boat to steer when we go out—I have run
+her nose on several times; decidedly, I begin to feel quite a little
+king.  Confound the cable, though!  I shall never be able to repair it.
+
+                                                        ‘Bona: October 14.
+
+‘We left Cagliari at 4.30 on the 9th and soon got to Spartivento.  I
+repeated some of my experiments, but found Thomson, who was to have been
+my grand stand-by, would not work on that day in the wretched little hut.
+Even if the windows and door had been put in, the wind which was very
+high made the lamp flicker about and blew it out; so I sent on board and
+got old sails, and fairly wrapped the hut up in them; and then we were as
+snug as could be, and I left the hut in glorious condition with a nice
+little stove in it.  The tent which should have been forthcoming from the
+curé’s for the guards, had gone to Cagliari; but I found another, [a]
+green, Turkish tent, in the _Elba_ and soon had him up.  The square tent
+left on the last occasion was standing all right and tight in spite of
+wind and rain.  We landed provisions, two beds, plates, knives, forks,
+candles, cooking utensils, and were ready for a start at 6 P.M.; but the
+wind meanwhile had come on to blow at such a rate that I thought better
+of it, and we stopped.  T— and S— slept ashore, however, to see how they
+liked it, at least they tried to sleep, for S— the ancient sergeant-major
+had a toothache, and T— thought the tent was coming down every minute.
+Next morning they could only complain of sand and a leaky coffee-pot, so
+I leave them with a good conscience.  The little encampment looked quite
+picturesque: the green round tent, the square white tent and the hut all
+wrapped up in sails, on a sand hill, looking on the sea and masking those
+confounded marshes at the back.  One would have thought the Cagliaritans
+were in a conspiracy to frighten the two poor fellows, who (I believe)
+will be safe enough if they do not go into the marshes after nightfall.
+S— brought a little dog to amuse them, such a jolly, ugly little cur
+without a tail, but full of fun; he will be better than quinine.
+
+‘The wind drove a barque, which had anchored near us for shelter, out to
+sea.  We started, however, at 2 P.M., and had a quick passage but a very
+rough one, getting to Bona by daylight [on the 11th].  Such a place as
+this is for getting anything done!  The health boat went away from us at
+7.30 with W— on board; and we heard nothing of them till 9.30, when W—
+came back with two fat Frenchmen who are to look on on the part of the
+Government.  They are exactly alike: only one has four bands and the
+other three round his cap, and so I know them.  Then I sent a boat round
+to Fort Gênois [Fort Genova of 1858], where the cable is landed, with all
+sorts of things and directions, whilst I went ashore to see about coals
+and a room at the fort.  We hunted people in the little square in their
+shops and offices, but only found them in cafés.  One amiable gentleman
+wasn’t up at 9.30, was out at 10, and as soon as he came back the servant
+said he would go to bed and not get up till 3: he came, however, to find
+us at a café, and said that, on the contrary, two days in the week he did
+not do so!  Then my two fat friends must have their breakfast after their
+“something” at a café; and all the shops shut from 10 to 2; and the post
+does not open till 12; and there was a road to Fort Gênois, only a bridge
+had been carried away, &c.  At last I got off, and we rowed round to Fort
+Gênois, where my men had put up a capital gipsy tent with sails, and
+there was my big board and Thomson’s number 5 in great glory.  I soon
+came to the conclusion there was a break.  Two of my faithful
+Cagliaritans slept all night in the little tent, to guard it and my
+precious instruments; and the sea, which was rather rough, silenced my
+Frenchmen.
+
+‘Next day I went on with my experiments, whilst a boat grappled for the
+cable a little way from shore and buoyed it where the _Elba_ could get
+hold.  I brought all back to the _Elba_, tried my machinery and was all
+ready for a start next morning.  But the wretched coal had not come yet;
+Government permission from Algiers to be got; lighters, men, baskets, and
+I know not what forms to be got or got through—and everybody asleep!
+Coals or no coals, I was determined to start next morning; and start we
+did at four in the morning, picked up the buoy with our deck engine,
+popped the cable across a boat, tested the wires to make sure the fault
+was not behind us, and started picking up at 11. Everything worked
+admirably, and about 2 P.M., in came the fault.  There is no doubt the
+cable was broken by coral fishers; twice they have had it up to their own
+knowledge.
+
+‘Many men have been ashore to-day and have come back tipsy, and the whole
+ship is in a state of quarrel from top to bottom, and they will gossip
+just within my hearing.  And we have had, moreover, three French
+gentlemen and a French lady to dinner, and I had to act host and try to
+manage the mixtures to their taste.  The good-natured little Frenchwoman
+was most amusing; when I asked her if she would have some apple
+tart—“_Mon Dieu_,” with heroic resignation, “_je veux bien_”; or a little
+_plombodding_—“_Mais ce que vous voudrez_, _Monsieur_!”
+
+‘S. S. _Elba_, somewhere not far from Bona: Oct. 19.
+
+‘Yesterday [after three previous days of useless grappling] was destined
+to be very eventful.  We began dredging at daybreak and hooked at once
+every time in rocks; but by capital luck, just as we were deciding it was
+no use to continue in that place, we hooked the cable: up it came, was
+tested, and lo! another complete break, a quarter of a mile off.  I was
+amazed at my own tranquillity under these disappointments, but I was not
+really half so fussy as about getting a cab.  Well, there was nothing for
+it but grappling again, and, as you may imagine, we were getting about
+six miles from shore.  But the water did not deepen rapidly; we seemed to
+be on the crest of a kind of submarine mountain in prolongation of Cape
+de Gonde, and pretty havoc we must have made with the crags.  What rocks
+we did hook!  No sooner was the grapnel down than the ship was anchored;
+and then came such a business: ship’s engines going, deck engine
+thundering, belt slipping, fear of breaking ropes: actually breaking
+grapnels.  It was always an hour or more before we could get the grapnel
+down again.  At last we had to give up the place, though we knew we were
+close to the cable, and go further to sea in much deeper water; to my
+great fear, as I knew the cable was much eaten away and would stand but
+little strain.  Well, we hooked the cable first dredge this time, and
+pulled it slowly and gently to the top, with much trepidation.  Was it
+the cable? was there any weight on? it was evidently too small.  Imagine
+my dismay when the cable did come up, but hanging loosely, thus
+
+           [Picture: Sketch of cable coming up hanging loosely]
+
+instead of taut, thus
+
+            [Picture: Sketch of cable coming up hanging taut]
+
+showing certain signs of a break close by.  For a moment I felt provoked,
+as I thought, “Here we are in deep water, and the cable will not stand
+lifting!”  I tested at once, and by the very first wire found it had
+broken towards shore and was good towards sea.  This was of course very
+pleasant; but from that time to this, though the wires test very well,
+not a signal has come from Spartivento.  I got the cable into a boat, and
+a gutta-percha line from the ship to the boat, and we signalled away at a
+great rate—but no signs of life.  The tests, however, make me pretty sure
+one wire at least is good; so I determined to lay down cable from where
+we were to the shore, and go to Spartivento to see what had happened
+there.  I fear my men are ill.  The night was lovely, perfectly calm; so
+we lay close to the boat and signals were continually sent, but with no
+result.  This morning I laid the cable down to Fort Gênois in style; and
+now we are picking up odds and ends of cable between the different
+breaks, and getting our buoys on board, &c.  To-morrow I expect to leave
+for Spartivento.’
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+And now I am quite at an end of journal keeping; diaries and diary
+letters being things of youth which Fleeming had at length outgrown.  But
+one or two more fragments from his correspondence may be taken, and first
+this brief sketch of the laying of the Norderney cable; mainly
+interesting as showing under what defects of strength and in what
+extremities of pain, this cheerful man must at times continue to go about
+his work.
+
+‘I slept on board 29th September having arranged everything to start by
+daybreak from where we lay in the roads: but at daybreak a heavy mist
+hung over us so that nothing of land or water could be seen.  At midday
+it lifted suddenly and away we went with perfect weather, but could not
+find the buoys Forde left, that evening.  I saw the captain was not
+strong in navigation, and took matters next day much more into my own
+hands and before nine o’clock found the buoys; (the weather had been so
+fine we had anchored in the open sea near Texel).  It took us till the
+evening to reach the buoys, get the cable on board, test the first half,
+speak to Lowestoft, make the splice, and start.  H— had not finished his
+work at Norderney, so I was alone on board for Reuter.  Moreover the
+buoys to guide us in our course were not placed, and the captain had very
+vague ideas about keeping his course; so I had to do a good deal, and
+only lay down as I was for two hours in the night.  I managed to run the
+course perfectly.  Everything went well, and we found Norderney just
+where we wanted it next afternoon, and if the shore end had been laid,
+could have finished there and then, October 1st.  But when we got to
+Norderney, we found the _Caroline_ with shore end lying apparently
+aground, and could not understand her signals; so we had to anchor
+suddenly and I went off in a small boat with the captain to the
+_Caroline_.  It was cold by this time, and my arm was rather stiff and I
+was tired; I hauled myself up on board the _Caroline_ by a rope and found
+H— and two men on board.  All the rest were trying to get the shore end
+on shore, but had failed and apparently had stuck on shore, and the waves
+were getting up.  We had anchored in the right place and next morning we
+hoped the shore end would be laid, so we had only to go back.  It was of
+course still colder and quite night.  I went to bed and hoped to sleep,
+but, alas, the rheumatism got into the joints and caused me terrible pain
+so that I could not sleep.  I bore it as long as I could in order to
+disturb no one, for all were tired; but at last I could bear it no longer
+and managed to wake the steward and got a mustard poultice which took the
+pain from the shoulder; but then the elbow got very bad, and I had to
+call the second steward and get a second poultice, and then it was
+daylight, and I felt very ill and feverish.  The sea was now rather
+rough—too rough rather for small boats, but luckily a sort of thing
+called a scoot came out, and we got on board her with some trouble, and
+got on shore after a good tossing about which made us all sea-sick.  The
+cable sent from the _Caroline_ was just 60 yards too short and did not
+reach the shore, so although the _Caroline_ did make the splice late that
+night, we could neither test nor speak.  Reuter was at Norderney, and I
+had to do the best I could, which was not much, and went to bed early; I
+thought I should never sleep again, but in sheer desperation got up in
+the middle of the night and gulped a lot of raw whiskey and slept at
+last.  But not long.  A Mr. F— washed my face and hands and dressed me:
+and we hauled the cable out of the sea, and got it joined to the
+telegraph station, and on October 3rd telegraphed to Lowestoft first and
+then to London.  Miss Clara Volkman, a niece of Mr. Reuter’s, sent the
+first message to Mrs. Reuter, who was waiting (Varley used Miss Clara’s
+hand as a kind of key), and I sent one of the first messages to Odden.  I
+thought a message addressed to him would not frighten you, and that he
+would enjoy a message through Papa’s cable.  I hope he did.  They were
+all very merry, but I had been so lowered by pain that I could not enjoy
+myself in spite of the success.’
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+Of the 1869 cruise in the _Great Eastern_, I give what I am able; only
+sorry it is no more, for the sake of the ship itself, already almost a
+legend even to the generation that saw it launched.
+
+‘_June_ 17, 1869.—Here are the names of our staff in whom I expect you to
+be interested, as future _Great Eastern_ stories may be full of them:
+Theophilus Smith, a man of Latimer Clark’s; Leslie C. Hill, my prizeman
+at University College; Lord Sackville Cecil; King, one of the Thomsonian
+Kings; Laws, goes for Willoughby Smith, who will also be on board;
+Varley, Clark, and Sir James Anderson make up the sum of all you know
+anything of.  A Captain Halpin commands the big ship.  There are four
+smaller vessels.  The _Wm. Cory_, which laid the Norderney cable, has
+already gone to St. Pierre to lay the shore ends.  The _Hawk_ and
+_Chiltern_ have gone to Brest to lay shore ends.  The _Hawk_ and
+_Scanderia_ go with us across the Atlantic and we shall at St. Pierre be
+transhipped into one or the other.
+
+‘_June_ 18.  _Somewhere in London_.—The shore end is laid, as you may
+have seen, and we are all under pressing orders to march, so we start
+from London to-night at 5.10.
+
+‘_June_ 20.  _Off Ushant_.—I am getting quite fond of the big ship.
+Yesterday morning in the quiet sunlight, she turned so slowly and lazily
+in the great harbour at Portland, and bye and bye slipped out past the
+long pier with so little stir, that I could hardly believe we were really
+off.  No men drunk, no women crying, no singing or swearing, no confusion
+or bustle on deck—nobody apparently aware that they had anything to do.
+The look of the thing was that the ship had been spoken to civilly and
+had kindly undertaken to do everything that was necessary without any
+further interference.  I have a nice cabin with plenty of room for my
+legs in my berth and have slept two nights like a top.  Then we have the
+ladies’ cabin set apart as an engineer’s office, and I think this
+decidedly the nicest place in the ship: 35 ft. × 20 ft. broad—four
+tables, three great mirrors, plenty of air and no heat from the funnels
+which spoil the great dining-room.  I saw a whole library of books on the
+walls when here last, and this made me less anxious to provide light
+literature; but alas, to-day I find that they are every one bibles or
+prayer-books.  Now one cannot read many hundred bibles. . . . As for the
+motion of the ship it is not very much, but ‘twill suffice.  Thomson
+shook hands and wished me well.  I _do_ like Thomson. . . . Tell Austin
+that the _Great Eastern_ has six masts and four funnels.  When I get back
+I will make a little model of her for all the chicks and pay out cotton
+reels. . . . Here we are at 4.20 at Brest.  We leave probably to-morrow
+morning.
+
+‘_July_ 12.  _Great Eastern_.—Here as I write we run our last course for
+the buoy at the St. Pierre shore end.  It blows and lightens, and our
+good ship rolls, and buoys are hard to find; but we must soon now finish
+our work, and then this letter will start for home. . . . Yesterday we
+were mournfully groping our way through the wet grey fog, not at all sure
+where we were, with one consort lost and the other faintly answering the
+roar of our great whistle through the mist.  As to the ship which was to
+meet us, and pioneer us up the deep channel, we did not know if we should
+come within twenty miles of her; when suddenly up went the fog, out came
+the sun, and there, straight ahead, was the _Wm. Cory_, our pioneer, and
+a little dancing boat, the _Gulnare_, sending signals of welcome with
+many-coloured flags.  Since then we have been steaming in a grand
+procession; but now at 2 A.M. the fog has fallen, and the great roaring
+whistle calls up the distant answering notes all around us.  Shall we, or
+shall we not find the buoy?
+
+‘_July_ 13.—All yesterday we lay in the damp dripping fog, with whistles
+all round and guns firing so that we might not bump up against one
+another.  This little delay has let us get our reports into tolerable
+order.  We are now at 7 o’clock getting the cable end again, with the
+main cable buoy close to us.’
+
+_A telegram of July_ 20: ‘I have received your four welcome letters.  The
+Americans are charming people.’
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+And here to make an end are a few random bits about the cruise to
+Pernambuco:—
+
+‘_Plymouth_, _June_ 21, 1873.—I have been down to the sea-shore and smelt
+the salt sea and like it; and I have seen the _Hooper_ pointing her great
+bow sea-ward, while light smoke rises from her funnels telling that the
+fires are being lighted; and sorry as I am to be without you, something
+inside me answers to the call to be off and doing.
+
+‘_Lalla Rookh_.  _Plymouth_, _June_ 22.—We have been a little cruise in
+the yacht over to the Eddystone lighthouse, and my sea-legs seem very
+well on.  Strange how alike all these starts are—first on shore, steaming
+hot days with a smell of bone-dust and tar and salt water; then the
+little puffing, panting steam-launch that bustles out across a port with
+green woody sides, little yachts sliding about, men-of-war
+training-ships, and then a great big black hulk of a thing with a mass of
+smaller vessels sticking to it like parasites; and that is one’s home
+being coaled.  Then comes the Champagne lunch where everyone says all
+that is polite to everyone else, and then the uncertainty when to start.
+So far as we know _now_, we are to start to-morrow morning at daybreak;
+letters that come later are to be sent to Pernambuco by first mail. . . .
+My father has sent me the heartiest sort of Jack Tar’s cheer.
+
+‘_S. S. Hooper_.  _Off Funchal_, _June_ 29.—Here we are off Madeira at
+seven o’clock in the morning.  Thomson has been sounding with his special
+toy ever since half-past three (1087 fathoms of water).  I have been
+watching the day break, and long jagged islands start into being out of
+the dull night.  We are still some miles from land; but the sea is calmer
+than Loch Eil often was, and the big _Hooper_ rests very contentedly
+after a pleasant voyage and favourable breezes.  I have not been able to
+do any real work except the testing [of the cable], for though not
+sea-sick, I get a little giddy when I try to think on board. . . . The
+ducks have just had their daily souse and are quacking and gabbling in a
+mighty way outside the door of the captain’s deck cabin where I write.
+The cocks are crowing, and new-laid eggs are said to be found in the
+coops.  Four mild oxen have been untethered and allowed to walk along the
+broad iron decks—a whole drove of sheep seem quite content while licking
+big lumps of bay salt.  Two exceedingly impertinent goats lead the cook a
+perfect life of misery.  They steal round the galley and _will_ nibble
+the carrots or turnips if his back is turned for one minute; and then he
+throws something at them and misses them; and they scuttle off laughing
+impudently, and flick one ear at him from a safe distance.  This is the
+most impudent gesture I ever saw.  Winking is nothing to it.  The ear
+normally hangs down behind; the goat turns sideways to her enemy—by a
+little knowing cock of the head flicks one ear over one eye, and squints
+from behind it for half a minute—tosses her head back, skips a pace or
+two further off, and repeats the manœuvre.  The cook is very fat and
+cannot run after that goat much.
+
+‘_Pernambuco_, _Aug._ 1.—We landed here yesterday, all well and cable
+sound, after a good passage. . . . I am on familiar terms with
+cocoa-nuts, mangoes, and bread-fruit trees, but I think I like the
+negresses best of anything I have seen.  In turbans and loose sea-green
+robes, with beautiful black-brown complexions and a stately carriage,
+they really are a satisfaction to my eye.  The weather has been windy and
+rainy; the _Hooper_ has to lie about a mile from the town, in an open
+roadstead, with the whole swell of the Atlantic driving straight on
+shore.  The little steam launch gives all who go in her a good ducking,
+as she bobs about on the big rollers; and my old gymnastic practice
+stands me in good stead on boarding and leaving her.  We clamber down a
+rope ladder hanging from the high stern, and then taking a rope in one
+hand, swing into the launch at the moment when she can contrive to steam
+up under us—bobbing about like an apple thrown into a tub all the while.
+The President of the province and his suite tried to come off to a State
+luncheon on board on Sunday; but the launch being rather heavily laden,
+behaved worse than usual, and some green seas stove in the President’s
+hat and made him wetter than he had probably ever been in his life; so
+after one or two rollers, he turned back; and indeed he was wise to do
+so, for I don’t see how he could have got on board. . . . Being fully
+convinced that the world will not continue to go round unless I pay it
+personal attention, I must run away to my work.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.—1869–1885.
+
+
+Edinburgh—Colleagues—_Farrago Vitæ_—I. The Family Circle—Fleeming and his
+Sons—Highland Life—The Cruise of the Steam Launch—Summer in Styria—Rustic
+Manners—II. The Drama—Private Theatricals—III. Sanitary Associations—The
+Phonograph—IV. Fleeming’s Acquaintance with a Student—His late Maturity
+of Mind—Religion and Morality—His Love of Heroism—Taste in Literature—V.
+His Talk—His late Popularity—Letter from M. Trélat.
+
+THE remaining external incidents of Fleeming’s life, pleasures, honours,
+fresh interests, new friends, are not such as will bear to be told at any
+length or in the temporal order.  And it is now time to lay narration by,
+and to look at the man he was and the life he lived, more largely.
+
+Edinburgh, which was thenceforth to be his home, is a metropolitan small
+town; where college professors and the lawyers of the Parliament House
+give the tone, and persons of leisure, attracted by educational
+advantages, make up much of the bulk of society.  Not, therefore, an
+unlettered place, yet not pedantic, Edinburgh will compare favourably
+with much larger cities.  A hard and disputatious element has been
+commented on by strangers: it would not touch Fleeming, who was himself
+regarded, even in this metropolis of disputation, as a thorny table-mate.
+To golf unhappily he did not take, and golf is a cardinal virtue in the
+city of the winds.  Nor did he become an archer of the Queen’s
+Body-Guard, which is the Chiltern Hundreds of the distasted golfer.  He
+did not even frequent the Evening Club, where his colleague Tait (in my
+day) was so punctual and so genial.  So that in some ways he stood
+outside of the lighter and kindlier life of his new home.  I should not
+like to say that he was generally popular; but there as elsewhere, those
+who knew him well enough to love him, loved him well.  And he, upon his
+side, liked a place where a dinner party was not of necessity
+unintellectual, and where men stood up to him in argument.
+
+The presence of his old classmate, Tait, was one of his early attractions
+to the chair; and now that Fleeming is gone again, Tait still remains,
+ruling and really teaching his great classes.  Sir Robert Christison was
+an old friend of his mother’s; Sir Alexander Grant, Kelland, and Sellar,
+were new acquaintances and highly valued; and these too, all but the
+last, have been taken from their friends and labours.  Death has been
+busy in the Senatus.  I will speak elsewhere of Fleeming’s demeanour to
+his students; and it will be enough to add here that his relations with
+his colleagues in general were pleasant to himself.
+
+Edinburgh, then, with its society, its university work, its delightful
+scenery, and its skating in the winter, was thenceforth his base of
+operations.  But he shot meanwhile erratic in many directions: twice to
+America, as we have seen, on telegraph voyages; continually to London on
+business; often to Paris; year after year to the Highlands to shoot, to
+fish, to learn reels and Gaelic, to make the acquaintance and fall in
+love with the character of Highlanders; and once to Styria, to hunt
+chamois and dance with peasant maidens.  All the while, he was pursuing
+the course of his electrical studies, making fresh inventions, taking up
+the phonograph, filled with theories of graphic representation; reading,
+writing, publishing, founding sanitary associations, interested in
+technical education, investigating the laws of metre, drawing, acting,
+directing private theatricals, going a long way to see an actor—a long
+way to see a picture; in the very bubble of the tideway of contemporary
+interests.  And all the while he was busied about his father and mother,
+his wife, and in particular his sons; anxiously watching, anxiously
+guiding these, and plunging with his whole fund of youthfulness into
+their sports and interests.  And all the while he was himself
+maturing—not in character or body, for these remained young—but in the
+stocked mind, in the tolerant knowledge of life and man, in pious
+acceptance of the universe.  Here is a farrago for a chapter: here is a
+world of interests and activities, human, artistic, social, scientific,
+at each of which he sprang with impetuous pleasure, on each of which he
+squandered energy, the arrow drawn to the head, the whole intensity of
+his spirit bent, for the moment, on the momentary purpose.  It was this
+that lent such unusual interest to his society, so that no friend of his
+can forget that figure of Fleeming coming charged with some new
+discovery: it is this that makes his character so difficult to represent.
+Our fathers, upon some difficult theme, would invoke the Muse; I can but
+appeal to the imagination of the reader.  When I dwell upon some one
+thing, he must bear in mind it was only one of a score; that the
+unweariable brain was teeming at the very time with other thoughts; that
+the good heart had left no kind duty forgotten.
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+In Edinburgh, for a considerable time, Fleeming’s family, to three
+generations, was united: Mr. and Mrs. Austin at Hailes, Captain and Mrs.
+Jenkin in the suburb of Merchiston, Fleeming himself in the city.  It is
+not every family that could risk with safety such close interdomestic
+dealings; but in this also Fleeming was particularly favoured.  Even the
+two extremes, Mr. Austin and the Captain, drew together.  It is pleasant
+to find that each of the old gentlemen set a high value on the good looks
+of the other, doubtless also on his own; and a fine picture they made as
+they walked the green terrace at Hailes, conversing by the hour.  What
+they talked of is still a mystery to those who knew them; but Mr. Austin
+always declared that on these occasions he learned much.  To both of
+these families of elders, due service was paid of attention; to both,
+Fleeming’s easy circumstances had brought joy; and the eyes of all were
+on the grandchildren.  In Fleeming’s scheme of duties, those of the
+family stood first; a man was first of all a child, nor did he cease to
+be so, but only took on added obligations, when he became in turn a
+father.  The care of his parents was always a first thought with him, and
+their gratification his delight.  And the care of his sons, as it was
+always a grave subject of study with him, and an affair never neglected,
+so it brought him a thousand satisfactions.  ‘Hard work they are,’ as he
+once wrote, ‘but what fit work!’  And again: ‘O, it’s a cold house where
+a dog is the only representative of a child!’  Not that dogs were
+despised; we shall drop across the name of Jack, the harum-scarum Irish
+terrier ere we have done; his own dog Plato went up with him daily to his
+lectures, and still (like other friends) feels the loss and looks visibly
+for the reappearance of his master; and Martin, the cat, Fleeming has
+himself immortalised, to the delight of Mr. Swinburne, in the columns of
+the _Spectator_.  Indeed there was nothing in which men take interest, in
+which he took not some; and yet always most in the strong human bonds,
+ancient as the race and woven of delights and duties.
+
+He was even an anxious father; perhaps that is the part where optimism is
+hardest tested.  He was eager for his sons; eager for their health,
+whether of mind or body; eager for their education; in that, I should
+have thought, too eager.  But he kept a pleasant face upon all things,
+believed in play, loved it himself, shared boyishly in theirs, and knew
+how to put a face of entertainment upon business and a spirit of
+education into entertainment.  If he was to test the progress of the
+three boys, this advertisement would appear in their little manuscript
+paper:—‘Notice: The Professor of Engineering in the University of
+Edinburgh intends at the close of the scholastic year to hold
+examinations in the following subjects: (1)  For boys in the fourth class
+of the Academy—Geometry and Algebra; (2)  For boys at Mr. Henderson’s
+school—Dictation and Recitation; (3)  For boys taught exclusively by
+their mothers—Arithmetic and Reading.’  Prizes were given; but what prize
+would be so conciliatory as this boyish little joke?  It may read thin
+here; it would smack racily in the playroom.  Whenever his sons ‘started
+a new fad’ (as one of them writes to me) they ‘had only to tell him about
+it, and he was at once interested and keen to help.’  He would discourage
+them in nothing unless it was hopelessly too hard for them; only, if
+there was any principle of science involved, they must understand the
+principle; and whatever was attempted, that was to be done thoroughly.
+If it was but play, if it was but a puppetshow they were to build, he set
+them the example of being no sluggard in play.  When Frewen, the second
+son, embarked on the ambitious design to make an engine for a toy
+steamboat, Fleeming made him begin with a proper drawing—doubtless to the
+disgust of the young engineer; but once that foundation laid, helped in
+the work with unflagging gusto, ‘tinkering away,’ for hours, and assisted
+at the final trial ‘in the big bath’ with no less excitement than the
+boy.  ‘He would take any amount of trouble to help us,’ writes my
+correspondent.  ‘We never felt an affair was complete till we had called
+him to see, and he would come at any time, in the middle of any work.’
+There was indeed one recognised playhour, immediately after the despatch
+of the day’s letters; and the boys were to be seen waiting on the stairs
+until the mail should be ready and the fun could begin.  But at no other
+time did this busy man suffer his work to interfere with that first duty
+to his children; and there is a pleasant tale of the inventive Master
+Frewen, engaged at the time upon a toy crane, bringing to the study where
+his father sat at work a half-wound reel that formed some part of his
+design, and observing, ‘Papa, you might finiss windin’ this for me; I am
+so very busy to-day.’
+
+I put together here a few brief extracts from Fleeming’s letters, none
+very important in itself, but all together building up a pleasant picture
+of the father with his sons.
+
+‘_Jan._ 15_th_, 1875.—Frewen contemplates suspending soap bubbles by silk
+threads for experimental purposes.  I don’t think he will manage that.
+Bernard’ [the youngest] ‘volunteered to blow the bubbles with
+enthusiasm.’
+
+‘_Jan._ 17_th_.—I am learning a great deal of electrostatics in
+consequence of the perpetual cross-examination to which I am subjected.
+I long for you on many grounds, but one is that I may not be obliged to
+deliver a running lecture on abstract points of science, subject to
+cross-examination by two acute students.  Bernie does not cross-examine
+much; but if anyone gets discomfited, he laughs a sort of little
+silver-whistle giggle, which is trying to the unhappy blunderer.’
+
+‘_May_ 9_th_.—Frewen is deep in parachutes.  I beg him not to drop from
+the top landing in one of his own making.’
+
+‘_June_ 6_th_, 1876.—Frewen’s crank axle is a failure just at present—but
+he bears up.’
+
+‘_June_ 14_th_.—The boys enjoy their riding.  It gets them whole funds of
+adventures.  One of their caps falling off is matter for delightful
+reminiscences; and when a horse breaks his step, the occurrence becomes a
+rear, a shy, or a plunge as they talk it over.  Austin, with quiet
+confidence, speaks of the greater pleasure in riding a spirited horse,
+even if he does give a little trouble.  It is the stolid brute that he
+dislikes.  (N.B. You can still see six inches between him and the saddle
+when his pony trots.)  I listen and sympathise and throw out no hint that
+their achievements are not really great.’
+
+‘_June_ 18_th_.—Bernard is much impressed by the fact that I can be
+useful to Frewen about the steamboat’ [which the latter irrepressible
+inventor was making].  ‘He says quite with awe, “He would not have got on
+nearly so well if you had not helped him.”’
+
+‘_June_ 27_th_.—I do not see what I could do without Austin.  He talks so
+pleasantly and is so truly good all through.’
+
+‘_June_ 27_th_.—My chief difficulty with Austin is to get him measured
+for a pair of trousers.  Hitherto I have failed, but I keep a stout heart
+and mean to succeed.  Frewen the observer, in describing the paces of two
+horses, says, “Polly takes twenty-seven steps to get round the school.  I
+couldn’t count Sophy, but she takes more than a hundred.”’
+
+‘_Feb._ 18_th_, 1877.—We all feel very lonely without you.  Frewen had to
+come up and sit in my room for company last night and I actually kissed
+him, a thing that has not occurred for years.  Jack, poor fellow, bears
+it as well as he can, and has taken the opportunity of having a fester on
+his foot, so he is lame and has it bathed, and this occupies his thoughts
+a good deal.’
+
+‘_Feb._ 19_th_.—As to Mill, Austin has not got the list yet.  I think it
+will prejudice him very much against Mill—but that is not my affair.
+Education of that kind! . . . I would as soon cram my boys with food and
+boast of the pounds they had eaten, as cram them with literature.’
+
+But if Fleeming was an anxious father, he did not suffer his anxiety to
+prevent the boys from any manly or even dangerous pursuit.  Whatever it
+might occur to them to try, he would carefully show them how to do it,
+explain the risks, and then either share the danger himself or, if that
+were not possible, stand aside and wait the event with that unhappy
+courage of the looker-on.  He was a good swimmer, and taught them to
+swim.  He thoroughly loved all manly exercises; and during their
+holidays, and principally in the Highlands, helped and encouraged them to
+excel in as many as possible: to shoot, to fish, to walk, to pull an oar,
+to hand, reef and steer, and to run a steam launch.  In all of these, and
+in all parts of Highland life, he shared delightedly.  He was well on to
+forty when he took once more to shooting, he was forty-three when he
+killed his first salmon, but no boy could have more single-mindedly
+rejoiced in these pursuits.  His growing love for the Highland character,
+perhaps also a sense of the difficulty of the task, led him to take up at
+forty-one the study of Gaelic; in which he made some shadow of progress,
+but not much: the fastnesses of that elusive speech retaining to the last
+their independence.  At the house of his friend Mrs. Blackburn, who plays
+the part of a Highland lady as to the manner born, he learned the
+delightful custom of kitchen dances, which became the rule at his own
+house and brought him into yet nearer contact with his neighbours.  And
+thus at forty-two, he began to learn the reel; a study, to which he
+brought his usual smiling earnestness; and the steps, diagrammatically
+represented by his own hand, are before me as I write.
+
+It was in 1879 that a new feature was added to the Highland life: a steam
+launch, called the _Purgle_, the Styrian corruption of Walpurga, after a
+friend to be hereafter mentioned.  ‘The steam launch goes,’ Fleeming
+wrote.  ‘I wish you had been present to describe two scenes of which she
+has been the occasion already: one during which the population of
+Ullapool, to a baby, was harnessed to her hurrahing—and the other in
+which the same population sat with its legs over a little pier, watching
+Frewen and Bernie getting up steam for the first time.’  The _Purgle_ was
+got with educational intent; and it served its purpose so well, and the
+boys knew their business so practically, that when the summer was at an
+end, Fleeming, Mrs. Jenkin, Frewen the engineer, Bernard the stoker, and
+Kenneth Robertson a Highland seaman, set forth in her to make the passage
+south.  The first morning they got from Loch Broom into Gruinard bay,
+where they lunched upon an island; but the wind blowing up in the
+afternoon, with sheets of rain, it was found impossible to beat to sea;
+and very much in the situation of castaways upon an unknown coast, the
+party landed at the mouth of Gruinard river.  A shooting lodge was spied
+among the trees; there Fleeming went; and though the master, Mr. Murray,
+was from home, though the two Jenkin boys were of course as black as
+colliers, and all the castaways so wetted through that, as they stood in
+the passage, pools formed about their feet and ran before them into the
+house, yet Mrs. Murray kindly entertained them for the night.  On the
+morrow, however, visitors were to arrive; there would be no room and, in
+so out-of-the-way a spot, most probably no food for the crew of the
+_Purgle_; and on the morrow about noon, with the bay white with spindrift
+and the wind so strong that one could scarcely stand against it, they got
+up steam and skulked under the land as far as Sanda Bay.  Here they crept
+into a seaside cave, and cooked some food; but the weather now freshening
+to a gale, it was plain they must moor the launch where she was, and find
+their way overland to some place of shelter.  Even to get their baggage
+from on board was no light business; for the dingy was blown so far to
+leeward every trip, that they must carry her back by hand along the
+beach.  But this once managed, and a cart procured in the neighbourhood,
+they were able to spend the night in a pot-house on Ault Bea.  Next day,
+the sea was unapproachable; but the next they had a pleasant passage to
+Poolewe, hugging the cliffs, the falling swell bursting close by them in
+the gullies, and the black scarts that sat like ornaments on the top of
+every stack and pinnacle, looking down into the _Purgle_ as she passed.
+The climate of Scotland had not done with them yet: for three days they
+lay storm-stayed in Poolewe, and when they put to sea on the morning of
+the fourth, the sailors prayed them for God’s sake not to attempt the
+passage.  Their setting out was indeed merely tentative; but presently
+they had gone too far to return, and found themselves committed to double
+Rhu Reay with a foul wind and a cross sea.  From half-past eleven in the
+morning until half-past five at night, they were in immediate and
+unceasing danger.  Upon the least mishap, the _Purgle_ must either have
+been swamped by the seas or bulged upon the cliffs of that rude headland.
+Fleeming and Robertson took turns baling and steering; Mrs. Jenkin, so
+violent was the commotion of the boat, held on with both hands; Frewen,
+by Robertson’s direction, ran the engine, slacking and pressing her to
+meet the seas; and Bernard, only twelve years old, deadly sea-sick, and
+continually thrown against the boiler, so that he was found next day to
+be covered with burns, yet kept an even fire.  It was a very thankful
+party that sat down that evening to meat in the Hotel at Gairloch.  And
+perhaps, although the thing was new in the family, no one was much
+surprised when Fleeming said grace over that meal.  Thenceforward he
+continued to observe the form, so that there was kept alive in his house
+a grateful memory of peril and deliverance.  But there was nothing of the
+muff in Fleeming; he thought it a good thing to escape death, but a
+becoming and a healthful thing to run the risk of it; and what is rarer,
+that which he thought for himself, he thought for his family also.  In
+spite of the terrors of Rhu Reay, the cruise was persevered in and
+brought to an end under happier conditions.
+
+One year, instead of the Highlands, Alt Aussee, in the Steiermark, was
+chosen for the holidays; and the place, the people, and the life
+delighted Fleeming.  He worked hard at German, which he had much
+forgotten since he was a boy; and what is highly characteristic, equally
+hard at the patois, in which he learned to excel.  He won a prize at a
+Schützen-fest; and though he hunted chamois without much success, brought
+down more interesting game in the shape of the Styrian peasants, and in
+particular of his gillie, Joseph.  This Joseph was much of a character;
+and his appreciations of Fleeming have a fine note of their own.  The
+bringing up of the boys he deigned to approve of: ‘_fast so gut wie ein
+bauer_,’ was his trenchant criticism.  The attention and courtly respect
+with which Fleeming surrounded his wife, was something of a puzzle to the
+philosophic gillie; he announced in the village that Mrs. Jenkin—_die
+silberne Frau_, as the folk had prettily named her from some silver
+ornaments—was a ‘_geborene Gräfin_’ who had married beneath her; and when
+Fleeming explained what he called the English theory (though indeed it
+was quite his own) of married relations, Joseph, admiring but
+unconvinced, avowed it was ‘_gar schön_.’  Joseph’s cousin, Walpurga
+Moser, to an orchestra of clarionet and zither, taught the family the
+country dances, the Steierisch and the Ländler, and gained their hearts
+during the lessons.  Her sister Loys, too, who was up at the Alp with the
+cattle, came down to church on Sundays, made acquaintance with the
+Jenkins, and must have them up to see the sunrise from her house upon the
+Loser, where they had supper and all slept in the loft among the hay.
+The Mosers were not lost sight of; Walpurga still corresponds with Mrs.
+Jenkin, and it was a late pleasure of Fleeming’s to choose and despatch a
+wedding present for his little mountain friend.  This visit was brought
+to an end by a ball in the big inn parlour; the refreshments chosen, the
+list of guests drawn up, by Joseph; the best music of the place in
+attendance; and hosts and guests in their best clothes.  The ball was
+opened by Mrs. Jenkin dancing Steierisch with a lordly Bauer, in gray and
+silver and with a plumed hat; and Fleeming followed with Walpurga Moser.
+
+There ran a principle through all these holiday pleasures.  In Styria as
+in the Highlands, the same course was followed: Fleeming threw himself as
+fully as he could into the life and occupations of the native people,
+studying everywhere their dances and their language, and conforming,
+always with pleasure, to their rustic etiquette.  Just as the ball at Alt
+Aussee was designed for the taste of Joseph, the parting feast at
+Attadale was ordered in every particular to the taste of Murdoch the
+Keeper.  Fleeming was not one of the common, so-called gentlemen, who
+take the tricks of their own coterie to be eternal principles of taste.
+He was aware, on the other hand, that rustic people dwelling in their own
+places, follow ancient rules with fastidious precision, and are easily
+shocked and embarrassed by what (if they used the word) they would have
+to call the vulgarity of visitors from town.  And he, who was so cavalier
+with men of his own class, was sedulous to shield the more tender
+feelings of the peasant; he, who could be so trying in a drawing-room,
+was even punctilious in the cottage.  It was in all respects a happy
+virtue.  It renewed his life, during these holidays, in all particulars.
+It often entertained him with the discovery of strange survivals; as
+when, by the orders of Murdoch, Mrs. Jenkin must publicly taste of every
+dish before it was set before her guests.  And thus to throw himself into
+a fresh life and a new school of manners was a grateful exercise of
+Fleeming’s mimetic instinct; and to the pleasures of the open air, of
+hardships supported, of dexterities improved and displayed, and of plain
+and elegant society, added a spice of drama.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+Fleeming was all his life a lover of the play and all that belonged to
+it.  Dramatic literature he knew fully.  He was one of the not very
+numerous people who can read a play: a knack, the fruit of much knowledge
+and some imagination, comparable to that of reading score.  Few men
+better understood the artificial principles on which a play is good or
+bad; few more unaffectedly enjoyed a piece of any merit of construction.
+His own play was conceived with a double design; for he had long been
+filled with his theory of the true story of Griselda; used to gird at
+Father Chaucer for his misconception; and was, perhaps first of all,
+moved by the desire to do justice to the Marquis of Saluces, and perhaps
+only in the second place, by the wish to treat a story (as he phrased it)
+like a sum in arithmetic.  I do not think he quite succeeded; but I must
+own myself no fit judge.  Fleeming and I were teacher and taught as to
+the principles, disputatious rivals in the practice, of dramatic writing.
+
+Acting had always, ever since Rachel and the Marseillaise, a particular
+power on him.  ‘If I do not cry at the play,’ he used to say, ‘I want to
+have my money back.’  Even from a poor play with poor actors, he could
+draw pleasure.  ‘Giacometti’s _Elisabetta_,’ I find him writing, ‘fetched
+the house vastly.  Poor Queen Elizabeth!  And yet it was a little good.’
+And again, after a night of Salvini: ‘I do not suppose any one with
+feelings could sit out _Othello_, if Iago and Desdemona were acted.’
+Salvini was, in his view, the greatest actor he had seen.  We were all
+indeed moved and bettered by the visit of that wonderful man.—‘I declare
+I feel as if I could pray!’ cried one of us, on the return from
+_Hamlet_.—‘That is prayer,’ said Fleeming.  W. B. Hole and I, in a fine
+enthusiasm of gratitude, determined to draw up an address to Salvini, did
+so, and carried it to Fleeming; and I shall never forget with what
+coldness he heard and deleted the eloquence of our draft, nor with what
+spirit (our vanities once properly mortified) he threw himself into the
+business of collecting signatures.  It was his part, on the ground of his
+Italian, to see and arrange with the actor; it was mine to write in the
+_Academy_ a notice of the first performance of _Macbeth_.  Fleeming
+opened the paper, read so far, and flung it on the floor.  ‘No,’ he
+cried, ‘that won’t do.  You were thinking of yourself, not of Salvini!’
+The criticism was shrewd as usual, but it was unfair through ignorance;
+it was not of myself that I was thinking, but of the difficulties of my
+trade which I had not well mastered.  Another unalloyed dramatic pleasure
+which Fleeming and I shared the year of the Paris Exposition, was the
+_Marquis de Villemer_, that blameless play, performed by Madeleine
+Brohan, Delaunay, Worms, and Broisat—an actress, in such parts at least,
+to whom I have never seen full justice rendered.  He had his fill of
+weeping on that occasion; and when the piece was at an end, in front of a
+café, in the mild, midnight air, we had our fill of talk about the art of
+acting.
+
+But what gave the stage so strong a hold on Fleeming was an inheritance
+from Norwich, from Edward Barron, and from Enfield of the _Speaker_.  The
+theatre was one of Edward Barron’s elegant hobbies; he read plays, as
+became Enfield’s son-in-law, with a good discretion; he wrote plays for
+his family, in which Eliza Barron used to shine in the chief parts; and
+later in life, after the Norwich home was broken up, his little
+granddaughter would sit behind him in a great armchair, and be
+introduced, with his stately elocution, to the world of dramatic
+literature.  From this, in a direct line, we can deduce the charades at
+Claygate; and after money came, in the Edinburgh days, that private
+theatre which took up so much of Fleeming’s energy and thought.  The
+company—Mr. and Mrs. R. O. Carter of Colwall, W. B. Hole, Captain Charles
+Douglas, Mr. Kunz, Mr. Burnett, Professor Lewis Campbell, Mr. Charles
+Baxter, and many more—made a charming society for themselves and gave
+pleasure to their audience.  Mr. Carter in Sir Toby Belch it would be
+hard to beat.  Mr. Hole in broad farce, or as the herald in the
+_Trachiniæ_, showed true stage talent.  As for Mrs. Jenkin, it was for
+her the rest of us existed and were forgiven; her powers were an endless
+spring of pride and pleasure to her husband; he spent hours hearing and
+schooling her in private; and when it came to the performance, though
+there was perhaps no one in the audience more critical, none was more
+moved than Fleeming.  The rest of us did not aspire so high.  There were
+always five performances and weeks of busy rehearsal; and whether we came
+to sit and stifle as the prompter, to be the dumb (or rather the
+inarticulate) recipients of Carter’s dog whip in the _Taming of the
+Shrew_, or having earned our spurs, to lose one more illusion in a
+leading part, we were always sure at least of a long and an exciting
+holiday in mirthful company.
+
+In this laborious annual diversion, Fleeming’s part was large.  I never
+thought him an actor, but he was something of a mimic, which stood him in
+stead.  Thus he had seen Got in Poirier; and his own Poirier, when he
+came to play it, breathed meritoriously of the model.  The last part I
+saw him play was Triplet, and at first I thought it promised well.  But
+alas! the boys went for a holiday, missed a train, and were not heard of
+at home till late at night.  Poor Fleeming, the man who never hesitated
+to give his sons a chisel or a gun, or to send them abroad in a canoe or
+on a horse, toiled all day at his rehearsal, growing hourly paler,
+Triplet growing hourly less meritorious.  And though the return of the
+children, none the worse for their little adventure, brought the colour
+back into his face, it could not restore him to his part.  I remember
+finding him seated on the stairs in some rare moment of quiet during the
+subsequent performances.  ‘Hullo, Jenkin,’ said I, ‘you look down in the
+mouth.’—‘My dear boy,’ said he, ‘haven’t you heard me?  I have not one
+decent intonation from beginning to end.’
+
+But indeed he never supposed himself an actor; took a part, when he took
+any, merely for convenience, as one takes a hand at whist; and found his
+true service and pleasure in the more congenial business of the manager.
+Augier, Racine, Shakespeare, Aristophanes in Hookham Frere’s translation,
+Sophocles and Æschylus in Lewis Campbell’s, such were some of the authors
+whom he introduced to his public.  In putting these upon the stage, he
+found a thousand exercises for his ingenuity and taste, a thousand
+problems arising which he delighted to study, a thousand opportunities to
+make these infinitesimal improvements which are so much in art and for
+the artist.  Our first Greek play had been costumed by the professional
+costumer, with unforgetable results of comicality and indecorum: the
+second, the _Trachiniæ_, of Sophocles, he took in hand himself, and a
+delightful task he made of it.  His study was then in antiquarian books,
+where he found confusion, and on statues and bas-reliefs, where he at
+last found clearness; after an hour or so at the British Museum, he was
+able to master ‘the chitôn, sleeves and all’; and before the time was
+ripe, he had a theory of Greek tailoring at his fingers’ ends, and had
+all the costumes made under his eye as a Greek tailor would have made
+them.  ‘The Greeks made the best plays and the best statues, and were the
+best architects: of course, they were the best tailors, too,’ said he;
+and was never weary, when he could find a tolerant listener, of dwelling
+on the simplicity, the economy, the elegance both of means and effect,
+which made their system so delightful.
+
+But there is another side to the stage-manager’s employment.  The
+discipline of acting is detestable; the failures and triumphs of that
+business appeal too directly to the vanity; and even in the course of a
+careful amateur performance such as ours, much of the smaller side of man
+will be displayed.  Fleeming, among conflicting vanities and levities,
+played his part to my admiration.  He had his own view; he might be
+wrong; but the performances (he would remind us) were after all his, and
+he must decide.  He was, in this as in all other things, an iron
+taskmaster, sparing not himself nor others.  If you were going to do it
+at all, he would see that it was done as well as you were able.  I have
+known him to keep two culprits (and one of these his wife) repeating the
+same action and the same two or three words for a whole weary afternoon.
+And yet he gained and retained warm feelings from far the most of those
+who fell under his domination, and particularly (it is pleasant to
+remember) from the girls.  After the slipshod training and the incomplete
+accomplishments of a girls’ school, there was something at first
+annoying, at last exciting and bracing, in this high standard of
+accomplishment and perseverance.
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+It did not matter why he entered upon any study or employment, whether
+for amusement like the Greek tailoring or the Highland reels, whether
+from a desire to serve the public as with his sanitary work, or in the
+view of benefiting poorer men as with his labours for technical
+education, he ‘pitched into it’ (as he would have said himself) with the
+same headlong zest.  I give in the Appendix a letter from Colonel
+Fergusson, which tells fully the nature of the sanitary work and of
+Fleeming’s part and success in it.  It will be enough to say here that it
+was a scheme of protection against the blundering of builders and the
+dishonesty of plumbers.  Started with an eye rather to the houses of the
+rich, Fleeming hoped his Sanitary Associations would soon extend their
+sphere of usefulness and improve the dwellings of the poor.  In this hope
+he was disappointed; but in all other ways the scheme exceedingly
+prospered, associations sprang up and continue to spring up in many
+quarters, and wherever tried they have been found of use.
+
+Here, then, was a serious employment; it has proved highly useful to
+mankind; and it was begun besides, in a mood of bitterness, under the
+shock of what Fleeming would so sensitively feel—the death of a whole
+family of children.  Yet it was gone upon like a holiday jaunt.  I read
+in Colonel Fergusson’s letter that his schoolmates bantered him when he
+began to broach his scheme; so did I at first, and he took the banter as
+he always did with enjoyment, until he suddenly posed me with the
+question: ‘And now do you see any other jokes to make?  Well, then,’ said
+he, ‘that’s all right.  I wanted you to have your fun out first; now we
+can be serious.’  And then with a glowing heat of pleasure, he laid his
+plans before me, revelling in the details, revelling in hope.  It was as
+he wrote about the joy of electrical experiment.  ‘What shall I compare
+them to?  A new song?—a Greek play?’  Delight attended the exercise of
+all his powers; delight painted the future.  Of these ideal visions, some
+(as I have said) failed of their fruition.  And the illusion was
+characteristic.  Fleeming believed we had only to make a virtue cheap and
+easy, and then all would practise it; that for an end unquestionably
+good, men would not grudge a little trouble and a little money, though
+they might stumble at laborious pains and generous sacrifices.  He could
+not believe in any resolute badness.  ‘I cannot quite say,’ he wrote in
+his young manhood, ‘that I think there is no sin or misery.  This I can
+say: I do not remember one single malicious act done to myself.  In fact
+it is rather awkward when I have to say the Lord’s Prayer.  I have
+nobody’s trespasses to forgive.’  And to the point, I remember one of our
+discussions.  I said it was a dangerous error not to admit there were bad
+people; he, that it was only a confession of blindness on our part, and
+that we probably called others bad only so far as we were wrapped in
+ourselves and lacking in the transmigratory forces of imagination.  I
+undertook to describe to him three persons irredeemably bad and whom he
+should admit to be so.  In the first case, he denied my evidence: ‘You
+cannot judge a man upon such testimony,’ said he.  For the second, he
+owned it made him sick to hear the tale; but then there was no spark of
+malice, it was mere weakness I had described, and he had never denied nor
+thought to set a limit to man’s weakness.  At my third gentleman, he
+struck his colours.  ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘I’m afraid that is a bad man.’  And
+then looking at me shrewdly: ‘I wonder if it isn’t a very unfortunate
+thing for you to have met him.’  I showed him radiantly how it was the
+world we must know, the world as it was, not a world expurgated and
+prettified with optimistic rainbows.  ‘Yes, yes,’ said he; ‘but this
+badness is such an easy, lazy explanation.  Won’t you be tempted to use
+it, instead of trying to understand people?’
+
+In the year 1878, he took a passionate fancy for the phonograph: it was a
+toy after his heart, a toy that touched the skirts of life, art, and
+science, a toy prolific of problems and theories.  Something fell to be
+done for a University Cricket Ground Bazaar.  ‘And the thought struck
+him,’ Mr. Ewing writes to me, ‘to exhibit Edison’s phonograph, then the
+very newest scientific marvel.  The instrument itself was not to be
+purchased—I think no specimen had then crossed the Atlantic—but a copy of
+the _Times_ with an account of it was at hand, and by the help of this we
+made a phonograph which to our great joy talked, and talked, too, with
+the purest American accent.  It was so good that a second instrument was
+got ready forthwith.  Both were shown at the Bazaar: one by Mrs. Jenkin
+to people willing to pay half a crown for a private view and the
+privilege of hearing their own voices, while Jenkin, perfervid as usual,
+gave half-hourly lectures on the other in an adjoining room—I, as his
+lieutenant, taking turns.  The thing was in its way a little triumph.  A
+few of the visitors were deaf, and hugged the belief that they were the
+victims of a new kind of fancy-fair swindle.  Of the others, many who
+came to scoff remained to take raffle tickets; and one of the phonographs
+was finally disposed of in this way, falling, by a happy freak of the
+ballot-box, into the hands of Sir William Thomson.’  The other remained
+in Fleeming’s hands, and was a source of infinite occupation.  Once it
+was sent to London, ‘to bring back on the tinfoil the tones of a lady
+distinguished for clear vocalisations; at another time Sir Robert
+Christison was brought in to contribute his powerful bass’; and there
+scarcely came a visitor about the house, but he was made the subject of
+experiment.  The visitors, I am afraid, took their parts lightly: Mr.
+Hole and I, with unscientific laughter, commemorating various shades of
+Scotch accent, or proposing to ‘teach the poor dumb animal to swear.’
+But Fleeming and Mr. Ewing, when we butterflies were gone, were
+laboriously ardent.  Many thoughts that occupied the later years of my
+friend were caught from the small utterance of that toy.  Thence came his
+inquiries into the roots of articulate language and the foundations of
+literary art; his papers on vowel sounds, his papers in the _Saturday
+Review_ upon the laws of verse, and many a strange approximation, many a
+just note, thrown out in talk and now forgotten.  I pass over dozens of
+his interests, and dwell on this trifling matter of the phonograph,
+because it seems to me that it depicts the man.  So, for Fleeming, one
+thing joined into another, the greater with the less.  He cared not where
+it was he scratched the surface of the ultimate mystery—in the child’s
+toy, in the great tragedy, in the laws of the tempest, or in the
+properties of energy or mass—certain that whatever he touched, it was a
+part of life—and however he touched it, there would flow for his happy
+constitution interest and delight.  ‘All fables have their morals,’ says
+Thoreau, ‘but the innocent enjoy the story.’  There is a truth
+represented for the imagination in these lines of a noble poem, where we
+are told, that in our highest hours of visionary clearness, we can but
+
+          ‘see the children sport upon the shore
+    And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.’
+
+To this clearness Fleeming had attained; and although he heard the voice
+of the eternal seas and weighed its message, he was yet able, until the
+end of his life, to sport upon these shores of death and mystery with the
+gaiety and innocence of children.
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+It was as a student that I first knew Fleeming, as one of that modest
+number of young men who sat under his ministrations in a soul-chilling
+class-room at the top of the University buildings.  His presence was
+against him as a professor: no one, least of all students, would have
+been moved to respect him at first sight: rather short in stature,
+markedly plain, boyishly young in manner, cocking his head like a terrier
+with every mark of the most engaging vivacity and readiness to be
+pleased, full of words, full of paradox, a stranger could scarcely fail
+to look at him twice, a man thrown with him in a train could scarcely
+fail to be engaged by him in talk, but a student would never regard him
+as academical.  Yet he had that fibre in him that order always existed in
+his class-room.  I do not remember that he ever addressed me in language;
+at the least sign of unrest, his eye would fall on me and I was quelled.
+Such a feat is comparatively easy in a small class; but I have misbehaved
+in smaller classes and under eyes more Olympian than Fleeming Jenkin’s.
+He was simply a man from whose reproof one shrank; in manner the least
+buckrammed of mankind, he had, in serious moments, an extreme dignity of
+goodness.  So it was that he obtained a power over the most insubordinate
+of students, but a power of which I was myself unconscious.  I was
+inclined to regard any professor as a joke, and Fleeming as a
+particularly good joke, perhaps the broadest in the vast pleasantry of my
+curriculum.  I was not able to follow his lectures; I somehow dared not
+misconduct myself, as was my customary solace; and I refrained from
+attending.  This brought me at the end of the session into a relation
+with my contemned professor that completely opened my eyes.  During the
+year, bad student as I was, he had shown a certain leaning to my society;
+I had been to his house, he had asked me to take a humble part in his
+theatricals; I was a master in the art of extracting a certificate even
+at the cannon’s mouth; and I was under no apprehension.  But when I
+approached Fleeming, I found myself in another world; he would have
+naught of me.  ‘It is quite useless for _you_ to come to me, Mr.
+Stevenson.  There may be doubtful cases, there is no doubt about yours.
+You have simply _not_ attended my class.’  The document was necessary to
+me for family considerations; and presently I stooped to such pleadings
+and rose to such adjurations, as made my ears burn to remember.  He was
+quite unmoved; he had no pity for me.—‘You are no fool,’ said he, ‘and
+you chose your course.’  I showed him that he had misconceived his duty,
+that certificates were things of form, attendance a matter of taste.  Two
+things, he replied, had been required for graduation, a certain
+competency proved in the final trials and a certain period of genuine
+training proved by certificate; if he did as I desired, not less than if
+he gave me hints for an examination, he was aiding me to steal a degree.
+‘You see, Mr. Stevenson, these are the laws and I am here to apply them,’
+said he.  I could not say but that this view was tenable, though it was
+new to me; I changed my attack: it was only for my father’s eye that I
+required his signature, it need never go to the Senatus, I had already
+certificates enough to justify my year’s attendance.  ‘Bring them to me;
+I cannot take your word for that,’ said he.  ‘Then I will consider.’  The
+next day I came charged with my certificates, a humble assortment.  And
+when he had satisfied himself, ‘Remember,’ said he, ‘that I can promise
+nothing, but I will try to find a form of words.’  He did find one, and I
+am still ashamed when I think of his shame in giving me that paper.  He
+made no reproach in speech, but his manner was the more eloquent; it told
+me plainly what a dirty business we were on; and I went from his
+presence, with my certificate indeed in my possession, but with no
+answerable sense of triumph.  That was the bitter beginning of my love
+for Fleeming; I never thought lightly of him afterwards.
+
+Once, and once only, after our friendship was truly founded, did we come
+to a considerable difference.  It was, by the rules of poor humanity, my
+fault and his.  I had been led to dabble in society journalism; and this
+coming to his ears, he felt it like a disgrace upon himself.  So far he
+was exactly in the right; but he was scarce happily inspired when he
+broached the subject at his own table and before guests who were
+strangers to me.  It was the sort of error he was always ready to repent,
+but always certain to repeat; and on this occasion he spoke so freely
+that I soon made an excuse and left the house with the firm purpose of
+returning no more.  About a month later, I met him at dinner at a common
+friend’s.  ‘Now,’ said he, on the stairs, ‘I engage you—like a lady to
+dance—for the end of the evening.  You have no right to quarrel with me
+and not give me a chance.’  I have often said and thought that Fleeming
+had no tact; he belied the opinion then.  I remember perfectly how, so
+soon as we could get together, he began his attack: ‘You may have grounds
+of quarrel with me; you have none against Mrs. Jenkin; and before I say
+another word, I want you to promise you will come to _her_ house as
+usual.’  An interview thus begun could have but one ending: if the
+quarrel were the fault of both, the merit of the reconciliation was
+entirely Fleeming’s.
+
+When our intimacy first began, coldly enough, accidentally enough on his
+part, he had still something of the Puritan, something of the inhuman
+narrowness of the good youth.  It fell from him slowly, year by year, as
+he continued to ripen, and grow milder, and understand more generously
+the mingled characters of men.  In the early days he once read me a
+bitter lecture; and I remember leaving his house in a fine spring
+afternoon, with the physical darkness of despair upon my eyesight.  Long
+after he made me a formal retractation of the sermon and a formal apology
+for the pain he had inflicted; adding drolly, but truly, ‘You see, at
+that time I was so much younger than you!’  And yet even in those days
+there was much to learn from him; and above all his fine spirit of piety,
+bravely and trustfully accepting life, and his singular delight in the
+heroic.
+
+His piety was, indeed, a thing of chief importance.  His views (as they
+are called) upon religious matters varied much; and he could never be
+induced to think them more or less than views.  ‘All dogma is to me mere
+form,’ he wrote; ‘dogmas are mere blind struggles to express the
+inexpressible.  I cannot conceive that any single proposition whatever in
+religion is true in the scientific sense; and yet all the while I think
+the religious view of the world is the most true view.  Try to separate
+from the mass of their statements that which is common to Socrates,
+Isaiah, David, St. Bernard, the Jansenists, Luther, Mahomet, Bunyan—yes,
+and George Eliot: of course you do not believe that this something could
+be written down in a set of propositions like Euclid, neither will you
+deny that there is something common and this something very valuable. . . .
+I shall be sorry if the boys ever give a moment’s thought to the
+question of what community they belong to—I hope they will belong to the
+great community.’  I should observe that as time went on his conformity
+to the church in which he was born grew more complete, and his views drew
+nearer the conventional.  ‘The longer I live, my dear Louis,’ he wrote
+but a few months before his death, ‘the more convinced I become of a
+direct care by God—which is reasonably impossible—but there it is.’  And
+in his last year he took the communion.
+
+But at the time when I fell under his influence, he stood more aloof; and
+this made him the more impressive to a youthful atheist.  He had a keen
+sense of language and its imperial influence on men; language contained
+all the great and sound metaphysics, he was wont to say; and a word once
+made and generally understood, he thought a real victory of man and
+reason.  But he never dreamed it could be accurate, knowing that words
+stand symbol for the indefinable.  I came to him once with a problem
+which had puzzled me out of measure: what is a cause? why out of so many
+innumerable millions of conditions, all necessary, should one be singled
+out and ticketed ‘the cause’?  ‘You do not understand,’ said he.  ‘A
+cause is the answer to a question: it designates that condition which I
+happen to know and you happen not to know.’  It was thus, with partial
+exception of the mathematical, that he thought of all means of reasoning:
+they were in his eyes but means of communication, so to be understood, so
+to be judged, and only so far to be credited.  The mathematical he made,
+I say, exception of: number and measure he believed in to the extent of
+their significance, but that significance, he was never weary of
+reminding you, was slender to the verge of nonentity.  Science was true,
+because it told us almost nothing.  With a few abstractions it could
+deal, and deal correctly; conveying honestly faint truths.  Apply its
+means to any concrete fact of life, and this high dialect of the wise
+became a childish jargon.
+
+Thus the atheistic youth was met at every turn by a scepticism more
+complete than his own, so that the very weapons of the fight were changed
+in his grasp to swords of paper.  Certainly the church is not right, he
+would argue, but certainly not the anti-church either.  Men are not such
+fools as to be wholly in the wrong, nor yet are they so placed as to be
+ever wholly in the right.  Somewhere, in mid air between the disputants,
+like hovering Victory in some design of a Greek battle, the truth hangs
+undiscerned.  And in the meanwhile what matter these uncertainties?
+Right is very obvious; a great consent of the best of mankind, a loud
+voice within us (whether of God, or whether by inheritance, and in that
+case still from God), guide and command us in the path of duty.  He saw
+life very simple; he did not love refinements; he was a friend to much
+conformity in unessentials.  For (he would argue) it is in this life as
+it stands about us, that we are given our problem; the manners of the day
+are the colours of our palette; they condition, they constrain us; and a
+man must be very sure he is in the right, must (in a favourite phrase of
+his) be ‘either very wise or very vain,’ to break with any general
+consent in ethics.  I remember taking his advice upon some point of
+conduct.  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘how do you suppose Christ would have advised
+you?’ and when I had answered that he would not have counselled me
+anything unkind or cowardly, ‘No,’ he said, with one of his shrewd
+strokes at the weakness of his hearer, ‘nor anything amusing.’  Later in
+life, he made less certain in the field of ethics.  ‘The old story of the
+knowledge of good and evil is a very true one,’ I find him writing; only
+(he goes on) ‘the effect of the original dose is much worn out, leaving
+Adam’s descendants with the knowledge that there is such a thing—but
+uncertain where.’  His growing sense of this ambiguity made him less
+swift to condemn, but no less stimulating in counsel.  ‘You grant
+yourself certain freedoms.  Very well,’ he would say, ‘I want to see you
+pay for them some other way.  You positively cannot do this: then there
+positively must be something else that you can do, and I want to see you
+find that out and do it.’  Fleeming would never suffer you to think that
+you were living, if there were not, somewhere in your life, some touch of
+heroism, to do or to endure.
+
+This was his rarest quality.  Far on in middle age, when men begin to lie
+down with the bestial goddesses, Comfort and Respectability, the strings
+of his nature still sounded as high a note as a young man’s.  He loved
+the harsh voice of duty like a call to battle.  He loved courage,
+enterprise, brave natures, a brave word, an ugly virtue; everything that
+lifts us above the table where we eat or the bed we sleep upon.  This
+with no touch of the motive-monger or the ascetic.  He loved his virtues
+to be practical, his heroes to be great eaters of beef; he loved the
+jovial Heracles, loved the astute Odysseus; not the Robespierres and
+Wesleys.  A fine buoyant sense of life and of man’s unequal character ran
+through all his thoughts.  He could not tolerate the spirit of the
+pick-thank; being what we are, he wished us to see others with a generous
+eye of admiration, not with the smallness of the seeker after faults.  If
+there shone anywhere a virtue, no matter how incongruously set, it was
+upon the virtue we must fix our eyes.  I remember having found much
+entertainment in Voltaire’s _Saül_, and telling him what seemed to me the
+drollest touches.  He heard me out, as usual when displeased, and then
+opened fire on me with red-hot shot.  To belittle a noble story was easy;
+it was not literature, it was not art, it was not morality; there was no
+sustenance in such a form of jesting, there was (in his favourite phrase)
+‘no nitrogenous food’ in such literature.  And then he proceeded to show
+what a fine fellow David was; and what a hard knot he was in about
+Bathsheba, so that (the initial wrong committed) honour might well
+hesitate in the choice of conduct; and what owls those people were who
+marvelled because an Eastern tyrant had killed Uriah, instead of
+marvelling that he had not killed the prophet also.  ‘Now if Voltaire had
+helped me to feel that,’ said he, ‘I could have seen some fun in it.’  He
+loved the comedy which shows a hero human, and yet leaves him a hero, and
+the laughter which does not lessen love.
+
+It was this taste for what is fine in human-kind, that ruled his choice
+in books.  These should all strike a high note, whether brave or tender,
+and smack of the open air.  The noble and simple presentation of things
+noble and simple, that was the ‘nitrogenous food’ of which he spoke so
+much, which he sought so eagerly, enjoyed so royally.  He wrote to an
+author, the first part of whose story he had seen with sympathy, hoping
+that it might continue in the same vein.  ‘That this may be so,’ he
+wrote, ‘I long with the longing of David for the water of Bethlehem.  But
+no man need die for the water a poet can give, and all can drink it to
+the end of time, and their thirst be quenched and the pool never dry—and
+the thirst and the water are both blessed.’  It was in the Greeks
+particularly that he found this blessed water; he loved ‘a fresh air’
+which he found ‘about the Greek things even in translations’; he loved
+their freedom from the mawkish and the rancid.  The tale of David in the
+Bible, the _Odyssey_, Sophocles, Æschylus, Shakespeare, Scott; old Dumas
+in his chivalrous note; Dickens rather than Thackeray, and the _Tale of
+Two Cities_ out of Dickens: such were some of his preferences.  To
+Ariosto and Boccaccio he was always faithful; _Burnt Njal_ was a late
+favourite; and he found at least a passing entertainment in the _Arcadia_
+and the _Grand Cyrus_.  George Eliot he outgrew, finding her latterly
+only sawdust in the mouth; but her influence, while it lasted, was great,
+and must have gone some way to form his mind.  He was easily set on edge,
+however, by didactic writing; and held that books should teach no other
+lesson but what ‘real life would teach, were it as vividly presented.’
+Again, it was the thing made that took him, the drama in the book; to the
+book itself, to any merit of the making, he was long strangely blind.  He
+would prefer the _Agamemnon_ in the prose of Mr. Buckley, ay, to Keats.
+But he was his mother’s son, learning to the last.  He told me one day
+that literature was not a trade; that it was no craft; that the professed
+author was merely an amateur with a door-plate.  ‘Very well,’ said I,
+‘the first time you get a proof, I will demonstrate that it is as much a
+trade as bricklaying, and that you do not know it.’  By the very next
+post, a proof came.  I opened it with fear; for he was indeed, as the
+reader will see by these volumes, a formidable amateur; always wrote
+brightly, because he always thought trenchantly; and sometimes wrote
+brilliantly, as the worst of whistlers may sometimes stumble on a perfect
+intonation.  But it was all for the best in the interests of his
+education; and I was able, over that proof, to give him a quarter of an
+hour such as Fleeming loved both to give and to receive.  His subsequent
+training passed out of my hands into those of our common friend, W. E.
+Henley.  ‘Henley and I,’ he wrote, ‘have fairly good times wigging one
+another for not doing better.  I wig him because he won’t try to write a
+real play, and he wigs me because I can’t try to write English.’  When I
+next saw him, he was full of his new acquisitions.  ‘And yet I have lost
+something too,’ he said regretfully.  ‘Up to now Scott seemed to me quite
+perfect, he was all I wanted.  Since I have been learning this confounded
+thing, I took up one of the novels, and a great deal of it is both
+careless and clumsy.’
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+He spoke four languages with freedom, not even English with any marked
+propriety.  What he uttered was not so much well said, as excellently
+acted: so we may hear every day the inexpressive language of a
+poorly-written drama assume character and colour in the hands of a good
+player.  No man had more of the _vis comica_ in private life; he played
+no character on the stage, as he could play himself among his friends.
+It was one of his special charms; now when the voice is silent and the
+face still, it makes it impossible to do justice to his power in
+conversation.  He was a delightful companion to such as can bear bracing
+weather; not to the very vain; not to the owlishly wise, who cannot have
+their dogmas canvassed; not to the painfully refined, whose sentiments
+become articles of faith.  The spirit in which he could write that he was
+‘much revived by having an opportunity of abusing Whistler to a knot of
+his special admirers,’ is a spirit apt to be misconstrued.  He was not a
+dogmatist, even about Whistler.  ‘The house is full of pretty things,’ he
+wrote, when on a visit; ‘but Mrs. —’s taste in pretty things has one very
+bad fault: it is not my taste.’  And that was the true attitude of his
+mind; but these eternal differences it was his joy to thresh out and
+wrangle over by the hour.  It was no wonder if he loved the Greeks; he
+was in many ways a Greek himself; he should have been a sophist and met
+Socrates; he would have loved Socrates, and done battle with him
+staunchly and manfully owned his defeat; and the dialogue, arranged by
+Plato, would have shown even in Plato’s gallery.  He seemed in talk
+aggressive, petulant, full of a singular energy; as vain you would have
+said as a peacock, until you trod on his toes, and then you saw that he
+was at least clear of all the sicklier elements of vanity.  Soundly rang
+his laugh at any jest against himself.  He wished to be taken, as he took
+others, for what was good in him without dissimulation of the evil, for
+what was wise in him without concealment of the childish.  He hated a
+draped virtue, and despised a wit on its own defence.  And he drew (if I
+may so express myself) a human and humorous portrait of himself with all
+his defects and qualities, as he thus enjoyed in talk the robust sports
+of the intelligence; giving and taking manfully, always without pretence,
+always with paradox, always with exuberant pleasure; speaking wisely of
+what he knew, foolishly of what he knew not; a teacher, a learner, but
+still combative; picking holes in what was said even to the length of
+captiousness, yet aware of all that was said rightly; jubilant in
+victory, delighted by defeat: a Greek sophist, a British schoolboy.
+
+Among the legends of what was once a very pleasant spot, the old Savile
+Club, not then divorced from Savile Row, there are many memories of
+Fleeming.  He was not popular at first, being known simply as ‘the man
+who dines here and goes up to Scotland’; but he grew at last, I think,
+the most generally liked of all the members.  To those who truly knew and
+loved him, who had tasted the real sweetness of his nature, Fleeming’s
+porcupine ways had always been a matter of keen regret.  They introduced
+him to their own friends with fear; sometimes recalled the step with
+mortification.  It was not possible to look on with patience while a man
+so lovable thwarted love at every step.  But the course of time and the
+ripening of his nature brought a cure.  It was at the Savile that he
+first remarked a change; it soon spread beyond the walls of the club.
+Presently I find him writing: ‘Will you kindly explain what has happened
+to me?  All my life I have talked a good deal, with the almost unfailing
+result of making people sick of the sound of my tongue.  It appeared to
+me that I had various things to say, and I had no malevolent feelings,
+but nevertheless the result was that expressed above.  Well, lately some
+change has happened.  If I talk to a person one day, they must have me
+the next.  Faces light up when they see me.—“Ah, I say, come here,”—“come
+and dine with me.”  It’s the most preposterous thing I ever experienced.
+It is curiously pleasant.  You have enjoyed it all your life, and
+therefore cannot conceive how bewildering a burst of it is for the first
+time at forty-nine.’  And this late sunshine of popularity still further
+softened him.  He was a bit of a porcupine to the last, still shedding
+darts; or rather he was to the end a bit of a schoolboy, and must still
+throw stones, but the essential toleration that underlay his
+disputatiousness, and the kindness that made of him a tender sicknurse
+and a generous helper, shone more conspicuously through.  A new pleasure
+had come to him; and as with all sound natures, he was bettered by the
+pleasure.
+
+I can best show Fleeming in this later stage by quoting from a vivid and
+interesting letter of M. Emile Trélat’s.  Here, admirably expressed, is
+how he appeared to a friend of another nation, whom he encountered only
+late in life.  M. Trélat will pardon me if I correct, even before I quote
+him; but what the Frenchman supposed to flow from some particular
+bitterness against France, was only Fleeming’s usual address.  Had M.
+Trélat been Italian, Italy would have fared as ill; and yet Italy was
+Fleeming’s favourite country.
+
+    Vous savez comment j’ai connu Fleeming Jenkin!  C’était en Mai 1878.
+    Nous étions tous deux membres du jury de l’Exposition Universelle.
+    On n’avait rien fait qui vaille à la première séance de notre classe,
+    qui avait eu lieu le matin.  Tout le monde avait parlé et reparlé
+    pour ne rien dire.  Cela durait depuis huit heures; il était midi.
+    Je demandai la parole pour une motion d’ordre, et je proposai que la
+    séance fut levée à la condition que chaque membre français,
+    _emportât_ à déjeuner un juré étranger.  Jenkin applaudit.  ‘Je vous
+    emmène déjeuner,’ lui criai-je.  ‘Je veux bien.’ . . . Nous partîmes;
+    en chemin nous vous rencontrions; il vous présente et nous allons
+    déjeuner tous trois auprès du Trocadéro.
+
+    Et, depuis ce temps, nous avons été de vieux amis.  Non seulement
+    nous passions nos journées au jury, où nous étions toujours ensemble,
+    côte-à-côte.  Mais nos habitudes s’étaient faites telles que, non
+    contents de déjeuner en face l’un de l’autre, je le ramenais dîner
+    presque tous les jours chez moi.  Cela dura une quinzaine: puis il
+    fut rappelé en Angleterre.  Mais il revint, et nous fîmes encore une
+    bonne étape de vie intellectuelle, morale et philosophique.  Je crois
+    qu’il me rendait déjà tout ce que j’éprouvais de sympathie et
+    d’estime, et que je ne fus pas pour rien dans son retour à Paris.
+
+    Chose singulière! nous nous étions attachés l’un à l’autre par les
+    sous-entendus bien plus que par la matière de nos conversations.  À
+    vrai dire, nous étions presque toujours en discussion; et il nous
+    arrivait de nous rire au nez l’un et l’autre pendant des heures, tant
+    nous nous étonnions réciproquement de la diversité de nos points de
+    vue.  Je le trouvais si Anglais, et il me trouvais si Français!  Il
+    était si franchement révolté de certaines choses qu’il voyait chez
+    nous, et je comprenais si mal certaines choses qui se passaient chez
+    vous!  Rien de plus intéressant que ces contacts qui étaient des
+    contrastes, et que ces rencontres d’idées qui étaient des choses;
+    rien de si attachant que les échappées de cœur ou d’esprit auxquelles
+    ces petits conflits donnaient à tout moment cours.  C’est dans ces
+    conditions que, pendant son séjour à Paris en 1878, je conduisis un
+    peu partout mon nouvel ami.  Nous allâmes chez Madame Edmond Adam, où
+    il vit passer beaucoup d’hommes politiques avec lesquels il causa.
+    Mais c’est chez les ministres qu’il fut intéressé.  Le moment était,
+    d’ailleurs, curieux en France.  Je me rappelle que, lorsque je le
+    présentai au Ministre du Commerce, il fit cette spirituelle repartie:
+    ‘C’est la seconde fois que je viens en France sous la République.  La
+    première fois, c’était en 1848, elle s’était coiffée de travers: je
+    suis bien heureux de saluer aujourd’hui votre excellence, quand elle
+    a mis son chapeau droit.’  Une fois je le menai voir couronner la
+    Rosière de Nanterre.  Il y suivit les cérémonies civiles et
+    religieuses; il y assista au banquet donné par le Maire; il y vit
+    notre de Lesseps, auquel il porta un toast.  Le soir, nous revînmes
+    tard à Paris; il faisait chaud; nous étions un peu fatigués; nous
+    entrâmes dans un des rares cafés encore ouverts.  Il devint
+    silencieux.—‘N’êtes-vous pas content de votre journée?’ lui
+    dis-je.—‘O, si! mais je réfléchis, et je me dis que vous êtes un
+    peuple gai—tous ces braves gens étaient gais aujourd’hui.  C’est une
+    vertu, la gaieté, et vous l’avez en France, cette vertu!’  Il me
+    disait cela mélancoliquement; et c’était la première fois que je lui
+    entendais faire une louange adressée à la France. . . . Mais il ne
+    faut pas que vous voyiez là une plainte de ma part.  Je serais un
+    ingrat si je me plaignais; car il me disait souvent: ‘Quel bon
+    Français vous faites!’  Et il m’aimait à cause de cela, quoiqu’il
+    semblât n’aimer pas la France.  C’était là un trait de son
+    originalité.  Il est vrai qu’il s’en tirait en disant que je ne
+    ressemblai pas à mes compatriotes, ce à quoi il ne connaissait
+    rien!—Tout cela était fort curieux; car, moi-même, je l’aimais
+    quoiqu’il en eût à mon pays!
+
+    En 1879 il amena son fils Austin à Paris.  J’attirai celui-ci.  Il
+    déjeunait avec moi deux fois par semaine.  Je lui montrai ce qu’était
+    l’intimité française en le tutoyant paternellement.  Cela reserra
+    beaucoup nos liens d’intimité avec Jenkin. . . . Je fis inviter mon
+    ami au congrès de l’_Association française pour l’avancement des
+    sciences_, qui se tenait à Rheims en 1880.  Il y vint.  J’eus le
+    plaisir de lui donner la parole dans la section du génie civil et
+    militaire, que je présidais.  Il y fit une très intéressante
+    communication, qui me montrait une fois de plus l’originalité de ses
+    vues et la sûreté de sa science.  C’est à l’issue de ce congrès que
+    je passai lui faire visite à Rochefort, où je le trouvai installé en
+    famille et où je présentai pour la première fois mes hommages à son
+    éminente compagne.  Je le vis là sous un jour nouveau et touchant
+    pour moi.  Madame Jenkin, qu’il entourait si galamment, et ses deux
+    jeunes fils donnaient encore plus de relief à sa personne.
+    J’emportai des quelques heures que je passai à côte de lui dans ce
+    charmant paysage un souvenir ému.
+
+    J’étais allé en Angleterre en 1882 sans pouvoir gagner Edimbourg.
+    J’y retournai en 1883 avec la commission d’assainissement de la ville
+    de Paris, dont je faisais partie.  Jenkin me rejoignit.  Je le fis
+    entendre par mes collègues; car il était fondateur d’une société de
+    salubrité.  Il eut un grand succès parmi nous.  Mais ce voyage me
+    restera toujours en mémoire parce que c’est là que se fixa
+    défenitivement notre forte amitié.  Il m’invita un jour à dîner à son
+    club et au moment de me faire asseoir à côté de lui, il me retint et
+    me dit: ‘Je voudrais vous demander de m’accorder quelque chose.
+    C’est mon sentiment que nos relations ne peuvent pas se bien
+    continuer si vous ne me donnez pas la permission de vous tutoyer.
+    Voulez-vous que nous nous tutoyions?’  Je lui pris les mains et je
+    lui dis qu’une pareille proposition venant d’un Anglais, et d’un
+    Anglais de sa haute distinction, c’était une victoire, dont je serais
+    fier toute ma vie.  Et nous commencions à user de cette nouvelle
+    forme dans nos rapports.  Vous savez avec quelle finesse il parlait
+    le français: comme il en connaissait tous les tours, comme il jouait
+    avec ses difficultés, et même avec ses petites gamineries.  Je crois
+    qu’il a été heureux de pratiquer avec moi ce tutoiement, qui ne
+    s’adapte pas à l’anglais, et qui est si français.  Je ne puis vous
+    peindre l’étendue et la variété de nos conversations de la soirée.
+    Mais ce que je puis vous dire, c’est que, sous la caresse du _tu_,
+    nos idées se sont élevées.  Nous avions toujours beaucoup ri
+    ensemble; mais nous n’avions jamais laissé des banalités s’introduire
+    dans nos échanges de pensées.  Ce soir-là, notre horizon intellectuel
+    s’est élargie, et nous y avons poussé des reconnaissances profondes
+    et lointaines.  Après avoir vivement causé à table, nous avons
+    longuement causé au salon; et nous nous séparions le soir à Trafalgar
+    Square, après avoir longé les trottoirs, stationné aux coins des rues
+    et deux fois rebroussé chemin en nous reconduisant l’un l’autre.  Il
+    était près d’une heure du matin!  Mais quelle belle passe
+    d’argumentation, quels beaux échanges de sentiments, quelles fortes
+    confidences patriotiques nous avions fournies!  J’ai compris ce soir
+    là que Jenkin ne détestait pas la France, et je lui serrai fort les
+    mains en l’embrassant.  Nous nous quittions aussi amis qu’on puisse
+    l’être; et notre affection s’était par lui étendue et comprise dans
+    un _tu_ français.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. 1875–1885.
+
+
+Mrs. Jenkin’s Illness—Captain Jenkin—The Golden Wedding—Death of Uncle
+John—Death of Mr. and Mrs. Austin—Illness and Death of the Captain—Death
+of Mrs. Jenkin—Effect on Fleeming—Telpherage—The End.
+
+AND now I must resume my narrative for that melancholy business that
+concludes all human histories.  In January of the year 1875, while
+Fleeming’s sky was still unclouded, he was reading Smiles.  ‘I read my
+engineers’ lives steadily,’ he writes, ‘but find biographies depressing.
+I suspect one reason to be that misfortunes and trials can be graphically
+described, but happiness and the causes of happiness either cannot be or
+are not.  A grand new branch of literature opens to my view: a drama in
+which people begin in a poor way and end, after getting gradually
+happier, in an ecstasy of enjoyment.  The common novel is not the thing
+at all.  It gives struggle followed by relief.  I want each act to close
+on a new and triumphant happiness, which has been steadily growing all
+the while.  This is the real antithesis of tragedy, where things get
+blacker and blacker and end in hopeless woe.  Smiles has not grasped my
+grand idea, and only shows a bitter struggle followed by a little respite
+before death.  Some feeble critic might say my new idea was not true to
+nature.  I’m sick of this old-fashioned notion of art.  Hold a mirror up,
+indeed!  Let’s paint a picture of how things ought to be and hold that up
+to nature, and perhaps the poor old woman may repent and mend her ways.’
+The ‘grand idea’ might be possible in art; not even the ingenuity of
+nature could so round in the actual life of any man.  And yet it might
+almost seem to fancy that she had read the letter and taken the hint; for
+to Fleeming the cruelties of fate were strangely blended with tenderness,
+and when death came, it came harshly to others, to him not unkindly.
+
+In the autumn of that same year 1875, Fleeming’s father and mother were
+walking in the garden of their house at Merchiston, when the latter fell
+to the ground.  It was thought at the time to be a stumble; it was in all
+likelihood a premonitory stroke of palsy.  From that day, there fell upon
+her an abiding panic fear; that glib, superficial part of us that speaks
+and reasons could allege no cause, science itself could find no mark of
+danger, a son’s solicitude was laid at rest; but the eyes of the body saw
+the approach of a blow, and the consciousness of the body trembled at its
+coming.  It came in a moment; the brilliant, spirited old lady leapt from
+her bed, raving.  For about six months, this stage of her disease
+continued with many painful and many pathetic circumstances; her husband
+who tended her, her son who was unwearied in his visits, looked for no
+change in her condition but the change that comes to all.  ‘Poor mother,’
+I find Fleeming writing, ‘I cannot get the tones of her voice out of my
+head. . . I may have to bear this pain for a long time; and so I am
+bearing it and sparing myself whatever pain seems useless.  Mercifully I
+do sleep, I am so weary that I must sleep.’  And again later: ‘I could do
+very well, if my mind did not revert to my poor mother’s state whenever I
+stop attending to matters immediately before me.’  And the next day: ‘I
+can never feel a moment’s pleasure without having my mother’s suffering
+recalled by the very feeling of happiness.  A pretty, young face recalls
+hers by contrast—a careworn face recalls it by association.  I tell you,
+for I can speak to no one else; but do not suppose that I wilfully let my
+mind dwell on sorrow.’
+
+In the summer of the next year, the frenzy left her; it left her stone
+deaf and almost entirely aphasic, but with some remains of her old sense
+and courage.  Stoutly she set to work with dictionaries, to recover her
+lost tongues; and had already made notable progress, when a third stroke
+scattered her acquisitions.  Thenceforth, for nearly ten years, stroke
+followed upon stroke, each still further jumbling the threads of her
+intelligence, but by degrees so gradual and with such partiality of loss
+and of survival, that her precise state was always and to the end a
+matter of dispute.  She still remembered her friends; she still loved to
+learn news of them upon the slate; she still read and marked the list of
+the subscription library; she still took an interest in the choice of a
+play for the theatricals, and could remember and find parallel passages;
+but alongside of these surviving powers, were lapses as remarkable, she
+misbehaved like a child, and a servant had to sit with her at table.  To
+see her so sitting, speaking with the tones of a deaf mute not always to
+the purpose, and to remember what she had been, was a moving appeal to
+all who knew her.  Such was the pathos of these two old people in their
+affliction, that even the reserve of cities was melted and the neighbours
+vied in sympathy and kindness.  Where so many were more than usually
+helpful, it is hard to draw distinctions; but I am directed and I delight
+to mention in particular the good Dr. Joseph Bell, Mr. Thomas, and Mr.
+Archibald Constable with both their wives, the Rev. Mr. Belcombe (of
+whose good heart and taste I do not hear for the first time—the news had
+come to me by way of the Infirmary), and their next-door neighbour,
+unwearied in service, Miss Hannah Mayne.  Nor should I omit to mention
+that John Ruffini continued to write to Mrs. Jenkin till his own death,
+and the clever lady known to the world as Vernon Lee until the end: a
+touching, a becoming attention to what was only the wreck and survival of
+their brilliant friend.
+
+But he to whom this affliction brought the greatest change was the
+Captain himself.  What was bitter in his lot, he bore with unshaken
+courage; only once, in these ten years of trial, has Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin
+seen him weep; for the rest of the time his wife—his commanding officer,
+now become his trying child—was served not with patience alone, but with
+a lovely happiness of temper.  He had belonged all his life to the
+ancient, formal, speechmaking, compliment-presenting school of courtesy;
+the dictates of this code partook in his eyes of the nature of a duty;
+and he must now be courteous for two.  Partly from a happy illusion,
+partly in a tender fraud, he kept his wife before the world as a still
+active partner.  When he paid a call, he would have her write ‘with love’
+upon a card; or if that (at the moment) was too much, he would go armed
+with a bouquet and present it in her name.  He even wrote letters for her
+to copy and sign: an innocent substitution, which may have caused
+surprise to Ruffini or to Vernon Lee, if they ever received, in the hand
+of Mrs. Jenkin the very obvious reflections of her husband.  He had
+always adored this wife whom he now tended and sought to represent in
+correspondence: it was now, if not before, her turn to repay the
+compliment; mind enough was left her to perceive his unwearied kindness;
+and as her moral qualities seemed to survive quite unimpaired, a childish
+love and gratitude were his reward.  She would interrupt a conversation
+to cross the room and kiss him.  If she grew excited (as she did too
+often) it was his habit to come behind her chair and pat her shoulder;
+and then she would turn round, and clasp his hand in hers, and look from
+him to her visitor with a face of pride and love; and it was at such
+moments only that the light of humanity revived in her eyes.  It was hard
+for any stranger, it was impossible for any that loved them, to behold
+these mute scenes, to recall the past, and not to weep.  But to the
+Captain, I think it was all happiness.  After these so long years, he had
+found his wife again; perhaps kinder than ever before; perhaps now on a
+more equal footing; certainly, to his eyes, still beautiful.  And the
+call made on his intelligence had not been made in vain.  The merchants
+of Aux Cayes, who had seen him tried in some ‘counter-revolution’ in
+1845, wrote to the consul of his ‘able and decided measures,’ ‘his cool,
+steady judgment and discernment’ with admiration; and of himself, as ‘a
+credit and an ornament to H. M. Naval Service.’  It is plain he must have
+sunk in all his powers, during the years when he was only a figure, and
+often a dumb figure, in his wife’s drawing-room; but with this new term
+of service, he brightened visibly.  He showed tact and even invention in
+managing his wife, guiding or restraining her by the touch, holding
+family worship so arranged that she could follow and take part in it.  He
+took (to the world’s surprise) to reading—voyages, biographies, Blair’s
+_Sermons_, even (for her letter’s sake) a work of Vernon Lee’s, which
+proved, however, more than he was quite prepared for.  He shone more, in
+his remarkable way, in society; and twice he had a little holiday to
+Glenmorven, where, as may be fancied, he was the delight of the
+Highlanders.  One of his last pleasures was to arrange his dining-room.
+Many and many a room (in their wandering and thriftless existence) had he
+seen his wife furnish with exquisite taste, and perhaps with
+‘considerable luxury’: now it was his turn to be the decorator.  On the
+wall he had an engraving of Lord Rodney’s action, showing the _Prothée_,
+his father’s ship, if the reader recollects; on either side of this on
+brackets, his father’s sword, and his father’s telescope, a gift from
+Admiral Buckner, who had used it himself during the engagement; higher
+yet, the head of his grandson’s first stag, portraits of his son and his
+son’s wife, and a couple of old Windsor jugs from Mrs. Buckner’s.  But
+his simple trophy was not yet complete; a device had to be worked and
+framed and hung below the engraving; and for this he applied to his
+daughter-in-law: ‘I want you to work me something, Annie.  An anchor at
+each side—an anchor—stands for an old sailor, you know—stands for hope,
+you know—an anchor at each side, and in the middle THANKFUL.’  It is not
+easy, on any system of punctuation, to represent the Captain’s speech.
+Yet I hope there may shine out of these facts, even as there shone
+through his own troubled utterance, some of the charm of that delightful
+spirit.
+
+In 1881, the time of the golden wedding came round for that sad and
+pretty household.  It fell on a Good Friday, and its celebration can
+scarcely be recalled without both smiles and tears.  The drawing-room was
+filled with presents and beautiful bouquets; these, to Fleeming and his
+family, the golden bride and bridegroom displayed with unspeakable pride,
+she so painfully excited that the guests feared every moment to see her
+stricken afresh, he guiding and moderating her with his customary tact
+and understanding, and doing the honours of the day with more than his
+usual delight.  Thence they were brought to the dining-room, where the
+Captain’s idea of a feast awaited them: tea and champagne, fruit and
+toast and childish little luxuries, set forth pell-mell and pressed at
+random on the guests.  And here he must make a speech for himself and his
+wife, praising their destiny, their marriage, their son, their
+daughter-in-law, their grandchildren, their manifold causes of gratitude:
+surely the most innocent speech, the old, sharp contemner of his
+innocence now watching him with eyes of admiration.  Then it was time for
+the guests to depart; and they went away, bathed, even to the youngest
+child, in tears of inseparable sorrow and gladness, and leaving the
+golden bride and bridegroom to their own society and that of the hired
+nurse.
+
+It was a great thing for Fleeming to make, even thus late, the
+acquaintance of his father; but the harrowing pathos of such scenes
+consumed him.  In a life of tense intellectual effort, a certain
+smoothness of emotional tenor were to be desired; or we burn the candle
+at both ends.  Dr. Bell perceived the evil that was being done; he
+pressed Mrs. Jenkin to restrain her husband from too frequent visits; but
+here was one of those clear-cut, indubitable duties for which Fleeming
+lived, and he could not pardon even the suggestion of neglect.
+
+And now, after death had so long visibly but still innocuously hovered
+above the family, it began at last to strike and its blows fell thick and
+heavy.  The first to go was uncle John Jenkin, taken at last from his
+Mexican dwelling and the lost tribes of Israel; and nothing in this
+remarkable old gentleman’s life, became him like the leaving of it.  His
+sterling, jovial acquiescence in man’s destiny was a delight to Fleeming.
+‘My visit to Stowting has been a very strange but not at all a painful
+one,’ he wrote.  ‘In case you ever wish to make a person die as he ought
+to die in a novel,’ he said to me, ‘I must tell you all about my old
+uncle.’  He was to see a nearer instance before long; for this family of
+Jenkin, if they were not very aptly fitted to live, had the art of manly
+dying.  Uncle John was but an outsider after all; he had dropped out of
+hail of his nephew’s way of life and station in society, and was more
+like some shrewd, old, humble friend who should have kept a lodge; yet he
+led the procession of becoming deaths, and began in the mind of Fleeming
+that train of tender and grateful thought, which was like a preparation
+for his own.  Already I find him writing in the plural of ‘these
+impending deaths’; already I find him in quest of consolation.  ‘There is
+little pain in store for these wayfarers,’ he wrote, ‘and we have
+hope—more than hope, trust.’
+
+On May 19, 1884, Mr. Austin was taken.  He was seventy-eight years of
+age, suffered sharply with all his old firmness, and died happy in the
+knowledge that he had left his wife well cared for.  This had always been
+a bosom concern; for the Barrons were long-lived and he believed that she
+would long survive him.  But their union had been so full and quiet that
+Mrs. Austin languished under the separation.  In their last years, they
+would sit all evening in their own drawing-room hand in hand: two old
+people who, for all their fundamental differences, had yet grown together
+and become all the world in each other’s eyes and hearts; and it was felt
+to be a kind release, when eight months after, on January 14, 1885, Eliza
+Barron followed Alfred Austin.  ‘I wish I could save you from all pain,’
+wrote Fleeming six days later to his sorrowing wife, ‘I would if I
+could—but my way is not God’s way; and of this be assured,—God’s way is
+best.’
+
+In the end of the same month, Captain Jenkin caught cold and was confined
+to bed.  He was so unchanged in spirit that at first there seemed no
+ground of fear; but his great age began to tell, and presently it was
+plain he had a summons.  The charm of his sailor’s cheerfulness and
+ancient courtesy, as he lay dying, is not to be described.  There he lay,
+singing his old sea songs; watching the poultry from the window with a
+child’s delight; scribbling on the slate little messages to his wife, who
+lay bed-ridden in another room; glad to have Psalms read aloud to him, if
+they were of a pious strain—checking, with an ‘I don’t think we need read
+that, my dear,’ any that were gloomy or bloody.  Fleeming’s wife coming
+to the house and asking one of the nurses for news of Mrs. Jenkin,
+‘Madam, I do not know,’ said the nurse; ‘for I am really so carried away
+by the Captain that I can think of nothing else.’  One of the last
+messages scribbled to his wife and sent her with a glass of the champagne
+that had been ordered for himself, ran, in his most finished vein of
+childish madrigal: ‘The Captain bows to you, my love, across the table.’
+When the end was near and it was thought best that Fleeming should no
+longer go home but sleep at Merchiston, he broke his news to the Captain
+with some trepidation, knowing that it carried sentence of death.
+‘Charming, charming—charming arrangement,’ was the Captain’s only
+commentary.  It was the proper thing for a dying man, of Captain Jenkin’s
+school of manners, to make some expression of his spiritual state; nor
+did he neglect the observance.  With his usual abruptness, ‘Fleeming,’
+said he, ‘I suppose you and I feel about all this as two Christian
+gentlemen should.’  A last pleasure was secured for him.  He had been
+waiting with painful interest for news of Gordon and Khartoum; and by
+great good fortune, a false report reached him that the city was
+relieved, and the men of Sussex (his old neighbours) had been the first
+to enter.  He sat up in bed and gave three cheers for the Sussex
+regiment.  The subsequent correction, if it came in time, was prudently
+withheld from the dying man.  An hour before midnight on the fifth of
+February, he passed away: aged eighty-four.
+
+Word of his death was kept from Mrs. Jenkin; and she survived him no more
+than nine and forty hours.  On the day before her death, she received a
+letter from her old friend Miss Bell of Manchester, knew the hand, kissed
+the envelope, and laid it on her heart; so that she too died upon a
+pleasure.  Half an hour after midnight, on the eighth of February, she
+fell asleep: it is supposed in her seventy-eighth year.
+
+Thus, in the space of less than ten months, the four seniors of this
+family were taken away; but taken with such features of opportunity in
+time or pleasant courage in the sufferer, that grief was tempered with a
+kind of admiration.  The effect on Fleeming was profound.  His pious
+optimism increased and became touched with something mystic and filial.
+‘The grave is not good, the approaches to it are terrible,’ he had
+written in the beginning of his mother’s illness: he thought so no more,
+when he had laid father and mother side by side at Stowting.  He had
+always loved life; in the brief time that now remained to him, he seemed
+to be half in love with death.  ‘Grief is no duty,’ he wrote to Miss
+Bell; ‘it was all too beautiful for grief,’ he said to me; but the
+emotion, call it by what name we please, shook him to his depths; his
+wife thought he would have broken his heart when he must demolish the
+Captain’s trophy in the dining-room, and he seemed thenceforth scarcely
+the same man.
+
+These last years were indeed years of an excessive demand upon his
+vitality; he was not only worn out with sorrow, he was worn out by hope.
+The singular invention to which he gave the name of telpherage, had of
+late consumed his time, overtaxed his strength and overheated his
+imagination.  The words in which he first mentioned his discovery to
+me—‘I am simply Alnaschar’—were not only descriptive of his state of
+mind, they were in a sense prophetic; since whatever fortune may await
+his idea in the future, it was not his to see it bring forth fruit.
+Alnaschar he was indeed; beholding about him a world all changed, a world
+filled with telpherage wires; and seeing not only himself and family but
+all his friends enriched.  It was his pleasure, when the company was
+floated, to endow those whom he liked with stock; one, at least, never
+knew that he was a possible rich man until the grave had closed over his
+stealthy benefactor.  And however Fleeming chafed among material and
+business difficulties, this rainbow vision never faded; and he, like his
+father and his mother, may be said to have died upon a pleasure.  But the
+strain told, and he knew that it was telling.  ‘I am becoming a fossil,’
+he had written five years before, as a kind of plea for a holiday visit
+to his beloved Italy.  ‘Take care!  If I am Mr. Fossil, you will be Mrs.
+Fossil, and Jack will be Jack Fossil, and all the boys will be little
+fossils, and then we shall be a collection.’  There was no fear more
+chimerical for Fleeming; years brought him no repose; he was as packed
+with energy, as fiery in hope, as at the first; weariness, to which he
+began to be no stranger, distressed, it did not quiet him.  He feared for
+himself, not without ground, the fate which had overtaken his mother;
+others shared the fear.  In the changed life now made for his family, the
+elders dead, the sons going from home upon their education, even their
+tried domestic (Mrs. Alice Dunns) leaving the house after twenty-two
+years of service, it was not unnatural that he should return to dreams of
+Italy.  He and his wife were to go (as he told me) on ‘a real honeymoon
+tour.’  He had not been alone with his wife ‘to speak of,’ he added,
+since the birth of his children.  But now he was to enjoy the society of
+her to whom he wrote, in these last days, that she was his ‘Heaven on
+earth.’  Now he was to revisit Italy, and see all the pictures and the
+buildings and the scenes that he admired so warmly, and lay aside for a
+time the irritations of his strenuous activity.  Nor was this all.  A
+trifling operation was to restore his former lightness of foot; and it
+was a renovated youth that was to set forth upon this reënacted
+honeymoon.
+
+The operation was performed; it was of a trifling character, it seemed to
+go well, no fear was entertained; and his wife was reading aloud to him
+as he lay in bed, when she perceived him to wander in his mind.  It is
+doubtful if he ever recovered a sure grasp upon the things of life; and
+he was still unconscious when he passed away, June the twelfth, 1885, in
+the fifty-third year of his age.  He passed; but something in his gallant
+vitality had impressed itself upon his friends, and still impresses.  Not
+from one or two only, but from many, I hear the same tale of how the
+imagination refuses to accept our loss and instinctively looks for his
+reappearing, and how memory retains his voice and image like things of
+yesterday.  Others, the well-beloved too, die and are progressively
+forgotten; two years have passed since Fleeming was laid to rest beside
+his father, his mother, and his Uncle John; and the thought and the look
+of our friend still haunt us.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX.
+
+
+I.  NOTE ON THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF FLEEMING JENKIN TO ELECTRICAL AND
+ENGINEERING SCIENCE.  BY SIR WILLIAM THOMSON, F.R.S., LL. D., ETC., ETC.
+
+
+IN the beginning of the year 1859 my former colleague (the first British
+University Professor of Engineering), Lewis Gordon, at that time deeply
+engaged in the then new work of cable making and cable laying, came to
+Glasgow to see apparatus for testing submarine cables and signalling
+through them, which I had been preparing for practical use on the first
+Atlantic cable, and which had actually done service upon it, during the
+six weeks of its successful working between Valencia and Newfoundland.
+As soon as he had seen something of what I had in hand, he said to me, ‘I
+would like to show this to a young man of remarkable ability, at present
+engaged in our works at Birkenhead.’  Fleeming Jenkin was accordingly
+telegraphed for, and appeared next morning in Glasgow.  He remained for a
+week, spending the whole day in my class-room and laboratory, and thus
+pleasantly began our lifelong acquaintance.  I was much struck, not only
+with his brightness and ability, but with his resolution to understand
+everything spoken of, to see if possible thoroughly through every
+difficult question, and (no if about this!) to slur over nothing.  I soon
+found that thoroughness of honesty was as strongly engrained in the
+scientific as in the moral side of his character.
+
+In the first week of our acquaintance, the electric telegraph and,
+particularly, submarine cables, and the methods, machines, and
+instruments for laying, testing, and using them, formed naturally the
+chief subject of our conversations and discussions; as it was in fact the
+practical object of Jenkin’s visit to me in Glasgow; but not much of the
+week had passed before I found him remarkably interested in science
+generally, and full of intelligent eagerness on many particular questions
+of dynamics and physics.  When he returned from Glasgow to Birkenhead a
+correspondence commenced between us, which was continued without
+intermission up to the last days of his life.  It commenced with a
+well-sustained fire of letters on each side about the physical qualities
+of submarine cables, and the practical results attainable in the way of
+rapid signalling through them.  Jenkin used excellently the valuable
+opportunities for experiment allowed him by Newall, and his partner Lewis
+Gordon, at their Birkenhead factory.  Thus he began definite scientific
+investigation of the copper resistance of the conductor, and the
+insulating resistance and specific inductive capacity of its gutta-percha
+coating, in the factory, in various stages of manufacture; and he was the
+very first to introduce systematically into practice the grand system of
+absolute measurement founded in Germany by Gauss and Weber.  The immense
+value of this step, if only in respect to the electric telegraph, is
+amply appreciated by all who remember or who have read something of the
+history of submarine telegraphy; but it can scarcely be known generally
+how much it is due to Jenkin.
+
+Looking to the article ‘Telegraph (Electric)’ in the last volume of the
+old edition of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ which was published about
+the year 1861, we find on record that Jenkin’s measurements in absolute
+units of the specific resistance of pure gutta-percha, and of the
+gutta-percha with Chatterton’s compound constituting the insulation of
+the Red Sea cable of 1859, are given as the only results in the way of
+absolute measurements of the electric resistance of an insulating
+material which had then been made.  These remarks are prefaced in the
+‘Encyclopædia’ article by the following statement: ‘No telegraphic
+testing ought in future to be accepted in any department of telegraphic
+business which has not this definite character; although it is only
+within the last year that convenient instruments for working, in absolute
+measure, have been introduced at all, and the whole system of absolute
+measure is still almost unknown to practical electricians.’
+
+A particular result of great importance in respect to testing is referred
+to as follows in the ‘Encyclopædia’ article: ‘The importance of having
+results thus stated in absolute measure is illustrated by the
+circumstance, that the writer has been able at once to compare them, in
+the manner stated in a preceding paragraph, with his own previous
+deductions from the testings of the Atlantic cable during its manufacture
+in 1857, and with Weber’s measurements of the specific resistance of
+copper.’  It has now become universally adapted—first of all in England;
+twenty-two years later by Germany, the country of its birth; and by
+France and Italy, and all the other countries of Europe and
+America—practically the whole scientific world—at the Electrical Congress
+in Paris in the years 1882 and 1884.
+
+An important paper of thirty quarto pages published in the ‘Transactions
+of the Royal Society’ for June 19, 1862, under the title ‘Experimental
+Researches on the Transmission of Electric Signals through submarine
+cables, Part I.  Laws of Transmission through various lengths of one
+cable, by Fleeming Jenkin, Esq., communicated by C. Wheatstone, Esq.,
+F.R.S.,’ contains an account of a large part of Jenkin’s experimental
+work in the Birkenhead factory during the years 1859 and 1860.  This
+paper is called Part I.  Part II. alas never appeared, but something that
+it would have included we can see from the following ominous statement
+which I find near the end of Part I.: ‘From this value, the
+electrostatical capacity per unit of length and the specific inductive
+capacity of the dielectric, could be determined.  These points will,
+however, be more fully treated of in the second part of this paper.’
+Jenkin had in fact made a determination at Birkenhead of the specific
+inductive capacity of gutta-percha, or of the gutta-percha and
+Chatterton’s compound constituting the insulation of the cable, on which
+he experimented.  This was the very first true measurement of the
+specific inductive capacity of a dielectric which had been made after the
+discovery by Faraday of the existence of the property, and his primitive
+measurement of it for the three substances, glass, shellac, and sulphur;
+and at the time when Jenkin made his measurements the existence of
+specific inductive capacity was either unknown, or ignored, or denied, by
+almost all the scientific authorities of the day.
+
+The original determination of the microfarad, brought out under the
+auspices of the British Association Committee on Electrical Standards, is
+due to experimental work by Jenkin, described in a paper, ‘Experiments on
+Capacity,’ constituting No. IV. of the appendix to the Report presented
+by the Committee to the Dundee Meeting of 1867.  No other determination,
+so far as I know, of this important element of electric measurement has
+hitherto been made; and it is no small thing to be proud of in respect to
+Jenkin’s fame as a scientific and practical electrician that the
+microfarad which we now all use is his.
+
+The British Association unit of electrical resistance, on which was
+founded the first practical approximation to absolute measurement on the
+system of Gauss and Weber, was largely due to Jenkin’s zeal as one of the
+originators, and persevering energy as a working member, of the first
+Electrical Standards Committee.  The experimental work of first making
+practical standards, founded on the absolute system, which led to the
+unit now known as the British Association ohm, was chiefly performed by
+Clerk Maxwell and Jenkin.  The realisation of the great practical benefit
+which has resulted from the experimental and scientific work of the
+Committee is certainly in a large measure due to Jenkin’s zeal and
+perseverance as secretary, and as editor of the volume of Collected
+Reports of the work of the Committee, which extended over eight years,
+from 1861 till 1869.  The volume of Reports included Jenkin’s Cantor
+Lectures of January, 1866, ‘On Submarine Telegraphy,’ through which the
+practical applications of the scientific principles for which he had
+worked so devotedly for eight years became part of general knowledge in
+the engineering profession.
+
+Jenkin’s scientific activity continued without abatement to the end.  For
+the last two years of his life he was much occupied with a new mode of
+electric locomotion, a very remarkable invention of his own, to which he
+gave the name of ‘Telpherage.’  He persevered with endless ingenuity in
+carrying out the numerous and difficult mechanical arrangements essential
+to the project, up to the very last days of his work in life.  He had
+completed almost every detail of the realisation of the system which was
+recently opened for practical working at Glynde, in Sussex, four months
+after his death.
+
+His book on ‘Magnetism and Electricity,’ published as one of Longman’s
+elementary series in 1873, marked a new departure in the exposition of
+electricity, as the first text-book containing a systematic application
+of the quantitative methods inaugurated by the British Association
+Committee on Electrical Standards.  In 1883 the seventh edition was
+published, after there had already appeared two foreign editions, one in
+Italian and the other in German.
+
+His papers on purely engineering subjects, though not numerous, are
+interesting and valuable.  Amongst these may be mentioned the article
+‘Bridges,’ written by him for the ninth edition of the ‘Encyclopædia
+Britannica,’ and afterwards republished as a separate treatise in 1876;
+and a paper ‘On the Practical Application of Reciprocal Figures to the
+Calculation of Strains in Framework,’ read before the Royal Society of
+Edinburgh, and published in the ‘Transactions’ of that Society in 1869.
+But perhaps the most important of all is his paper ‘On the Application of
+Graphic Methods to the Determination of the Efficiency of Machinery,’
+read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and published in the
+‘Transactions,’ vol. xxviii. (1876–78), for which he was awarded the
+Keith Gold Medal.  This paper was a continuation of the subject treated
+in ‘Reulaux’s Mechanism,’ and, recognising the value of that work,
+supplied the elements required to constitute from Reulaux’s kinematic
+system a full machine receiving energy and doing work.
+
+
+
+II.  NOTE ON THE WORK OF FLEEMING JENKIN IN CONNECTION WITH SANITARY
+REFORM.  BY LT. COL. ALEXANDER FERGUSSON.
+
+
+IT was, I believe, during the autumn of 1877 that there came to Fleeming
+Jenkin the first inkling of an idea, not the least in importance of the
+many that emanated from that fertile brain, which, with singular
+rapidity, took root, and under his careful fostering expanded into a
+scheme the fruits of which have been of the utmost value to his
+fellow-citizens and others.
+
+The phrase which afterwards suggested itself, and came into use, ‘Healthy
+houses,’ expresses very happily the drift of this scheme, and the
+ultimate object that Jenkin had in view.
+
+In the summer of that year there had been much talk, and some newspaper
+correspondence, on the subject of the unsatisfactory condition of many of
+the best houses in Edinburgh as regards their sanitary state.  One
+gentleman, for example, drew an appalling picture of a large and
+expensive house he had bought in the West-end of Edinburgh, fresh from
+the builder’s hands.  To ascertain precisely what was wrong, and the
+steps to be taken to remedy the evils, the effects of which were but too
+apparent, obviously demanded the expenditure of much time and careful
+study on the part of the intelligent proprietor himself and the
+professional experts he had to call in, and, it is needless to add, much
+money.  There came also, from the poorer parts of the town, the cry that
+in many cases the houses of our working people were built anyhow that the
+dictates of a narrow economy suggested to the speculative and
+irresponsible builder.  The horrors of what was called the ‘Sandwich
+system,’ amongst other evils, were brought to light.  It is sufficient to
+say, generally, that this particular practice of the builder consists in
+placing in a block of workmen’s houses, to save space and money, the
+water cisterns of one flat, directly under the sanitary appliances of the
+other, and so on to the top of a house of several storeys.  It is easy to
+conceive the abominations that must ensue when the leakage of the upper
+floors begins to penetrate to the drinking water below.  The picture was
+a hideous one, apart from the well-known fact that a whole class of
+diseases is habitually spread by contaminated water.
+
+In October, 1876, a brisk and interesting discussion had been carried on
+in the columns of the _Times_ at intervals during the greater part of
+that month, in which the same subject, that of the health and sewage of
+towns, had been dealt with by several writers well informed in such
+matters.  Amongst others, Professor Jenkin himself took part, as did
+Professor G. F. Armstrong, who now occupies the chair of Civil
+Engineering in Edinburgh.  Many of the truths then advanced had been
+recently discussed at a meeting of the British Association.
+
+It was while such topics were attracting attention that Fleeming Jenkin’s
+family were shocked by the sad intelligence of the loss that friends of
+theirs had sustained in the deaths of several of their children from
+causes that could be traced up to the unsanitary condition of their
+house.  Sympathy took the practical form of an intense desire that
+something might be done to mitigate the chance of such calamities; and, I
+am permitted to say, the result of a home-talk on this subject was an
+earnest appeal to the head of the house to turn his scientific knowledge
+to account in some way that should make people’s homes more healthy, and
+their children’s lives more safe.  In answer to the call Jenkin turned
+his thoughts in this direction.  And the scheme which I shall endeavour
+briefly to sketch out was the result.
+
+The obvious remedy for a faulty house is to call in a skilful expert,
+architect or engineer, who will doubtless point out by means of reports
+and plans what is wrong, and suggest a remedy; but, as remarked by
+Professor Jenkin, ‘it has not been the practice for leading engineers to
+advise individuals about their house arrangements, except where large
+outlay is in contemplation.’  A point of very considerable importance in
+such a case as that now supposed.
+
+The problem was to ensure to the great body of the citizens sound
+professional advice concerning their houses, such as had hitherto been
+only obtainable at great cost—but ‘with due regard to economical
+considerations.’
+
+The advantages of co-operation are patent to all.  Everyone can
+understand how, if a sufficient number of persons combine, there are few
+luxuries or advantages that are not within their reach, for a moderate
+payment.  The advice of a first-rate engineer regarding a dwelling-house
+was a palpable advantage; but within the reach of comparatively few.  One
+has heard of a winter in Madeira being prescribed as the cure for a poor
+Infirmary sufferer.
+
+Like most good plans Jenkin’s scheme was simple in the extreme, and
+consisted in _combination_ and a small subscription.
+
+‘Just,’ he says, ‘as the leading physician of the day may give his
+services to great numbers of poor patients when these are gathered in a
+hospital, although he could not practically visit them in their own
+houses, so the simple fact of a number of clients gathered into a group
+will enable the leading engineer to give them the benefit of his advice.’
+
+But it was his opinion that only ‘continual supervision could secure the
+householder from danger due to defects in sanitary appliances.’  He had
+in his eye a case precisely similar.  The following passage in one of his
+first lectures, afterwards repeated frequently, conveys the essence of
+Professor Jenkin’s theory, as well as a graceful acknowledgment of the
+source from which this happy idea was derived:—
+
+‘An analogous case occurred to him,’ he said, ‘in the “Steam Users’
+Association,” in Lancashire.  So many boilers burst in that district for
+want of inspection that an association was formed for having the boilers
+under a continual course of inspection.  Let a perfect boiler be bought
+from a first-rate maker, the owner has then an apparatus as perfect as it
+is now sought to make the sanitary appliances in his house.  But in the
+course of time the boiler must decay.  The prudent proprietor, therefore,
+joins the Steam-boiler Association, which, from time to time, examines
+his boiler, and by the tests they apply are able to give an absolute
+guarantee against accident.  This idea of an inspection by an association
+was due,’ the lecturer continued, ‘to Sir William Fairbairn, under whom
+he had the honour of serving his apprenticeship.’ {288}  The steam users
+were thus absolutely protected from danger; and the same idea it was
+sought to apply to the sanitary system of a house.
+
+To bring together a sufficient number of persons, to form such a ‘group’
+as had been contemplated, was the first step to be taken.  No time was
+lost in taking it.  The idea hitherto roughly blocked out was now given a
+more definite form.  The original sketch, as dictated by Jenkin himself,
+is before me, and I cannot do better than transcribe it, seeing it is
+short and simple.  Several important alterations were afterwards made by
+himself in consultation with one or two of his Provisional Council; and
+as experience suggested:—
+
+    ‘The objects of this Association are twofold.
+
+    ‘1.  By taking advantage of the principle of co-operation, to provide
+    its members at moderate cost with such advice and supervision as
+    shall ensure the proper sanitary condition of their own dwellings.
+
+    ‘2.  By making use of specially qualified officers to support the
+    inhabitants and local authorities in enforcing obedience to the
+    provisions of those laws and by-laws which affect the sanitary
+    condition of the community.
+
+    ‘It is proposed that an Association with these objects be formed; and
+    that all residents within the municipal boundaries of Edinburgh be
+    eligible as members.  That each member of the Association shall
+    subscribe _one guinea_ annually.  That in return for the annual
+    subscription each member shall be entitled to the following
+    advantages:—
+
+    ‘1.  A report by the Engineer of the Association on the sanitary
+    condition of his dwelling, with specific recommendations as to the
+    improvement of drainage, ventilation, &c., should this be found
+    necessary.
+
+    ‘2.  The supervision of any alterations in the sanitary fittings of
+    his dwelling which may be carried out by the advice, or with the
+    approval, of the officers of the Association.
+
+    ‘3.  An annual inspection of his premises by the Engineer of the
+    Association, with a report as to their sanitary condition.
+
+    ‘4.  The right, in consideration of a payment of five shillings, of
+    calling on the Engineer, and legal adviser {290} of the Association
+    to inspect and report on the existence of any infraction or supposed
+    infraction of any law affecting the sanitary condition of the
+    community.
+
+    ‘It is proposed that the Association should be managed by an unpaid
+    Council, to be selected by ballot from among its members.
+
+    ‘That the following salaried officers be engaged by the Association:
+
+    ‘1.  One or more acting engineers, who should give their services
+    exclusively to the Association.
+
+    ‘2.  A consulting engineer, who should exercise a general
+    supervision, and advise both on the general principles to be
+    followed, and on difficult cases.
+
+    ‘3.  A legal agent, to be engaged on such terms as the Council shall
+    hereafter think fit.
+
+    ‘4.  A permanent secretary.
+
+    ‘It is also proposed that the officers of the Association should,
+    with the sanction of the Council, have power to take legal
+    proceedings against persons who shall, in their opinion, be guilty of
+    any infraction of sanitary regulations in force throughout the
+    district; and generally it is intended that the Association shall
+    further and promote all undertakings which, in their opinion, are
+    calculated to improve the sanitary condition of Edinburgh and its
+    immediate neighbourhood.
+
+    ‘In one aspect this Association will be analogous to the Steam Boiler
+    Users’ Association, who co-operate in the employment of skilled
+    inspectors.  In a second aspect it will be analogous to the
+    Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which assists
+    the community in enforcing obedience to existing laws.’
+
+Towards the end of November, 1877, this paper was handed about among
+those who were thought most likely, from their position and public
+spirit, to forward such a scheme, so clearly for the good of the
+community.  Nay more, a systematic ‘canvass’ was set on foot; personal
+application the most direct was made use of.  The thing was new, and its
+advantages not perfectly obvious to all at a glance.  Everyone who knows
+with what enthusiastic earnestness Jenkin would take hold of, and insist
+upon, what he felt to be wholesome and right will understand how he
+persisted, how he patiently explained, and swept away objections that
+were raised.  One could not choose but listen, and understand, and agree.
+
+On the evening of 2nd January, 1878, or, to be more correct, the morning
+of the 3rd, two old school-fellows of his at the Edinburgh Academy walked
+home with him from an annual dinner of their ‘Class.’  All the way in
+glowing language he expounded his views of house inspection, and the
+protection of health, asking for sympathy.  It was most readily given,
+and they parted from him with pleasant words of banter regarding this
+vision of his of grafting ‘cleanliness’ upon another quality said to be a
+growth, in some sort, of this northern land of ours.
+
+But they reckoned hardly sufficiently on the fact that when Jenkin took a
+thing of this kind in hand it must _be_; if it lay within the scope of a
+clear head and boundless energy.
+
+Having secured a nucleus of well-wishers, the next step was to enlist the
+sympathies of the general public.  It was sought to effect this by a
+series of public lectures.  The first of these (one of two) was given on
+22nd January under the auspices of the Edinburgh Philosophical
+Institution.  It was apparent to the shrewd lecturer that in bringing
+before the people a scheme like this, where there was much that was
+novel, it was necessary first of all that his audience should be aware of
+the evils to which they were exposed in their own houses, before
+unfolding a plan for a remedy.  The correspondence already referred to as
+having been carried on in the summer of the previous year had shown how
+crude were the ideas of many persons well informed, or considered to be
+so, on this subject.  For example, there are few now-a-days who are not
+aware that a drain, to be safe, must have at intervals along its course
+openings to the upper air, or that it must be ‘ventilated,’ as the phrase
+goes.  But at the time spoken of there were some who went so far as to
+question this principle; even to argue against it; calling forth this
+forcible reply—’Here is a pretty farce.  You pour out a poison and send
+it off on its way to the sea, and forget that on its way there its very
+essence will take wings and fly back into your house up the very pipes it
+but recently ran down.’  A properly ‘trapped’ and ventilated drain was
+the cure for this.
+
+And the lecturer proceeded to show that in Edinburgh, where for the most
+part house construction is good and solid, but, as in other towns, the
+bulk of the houses were built when the arrangements for internal sewerage
+and water supply were very little understood, many serious errors were
+made.  ‘But,’ the lecturer went on to say, ‘Sanitary Science was now
+established on a fairly sound basis, and the germ theory, or theory of
+septic ferments, had explained much which used to be obscure.  This
+theory explained how it was that families might in certain cases live
+with fair health for many years in the midst of great filth, while the
+dwellers in large and apparently clean mansions were struck down by fever
+and diphtheria.  The filth which was found compatible with health was
+always isolated filth, and until the germs of some specific disease were
+introduced, this dirt was merely injurious, not poisonous.  The mansions
+which were apparently clean and yet fever-visited were found to be those
+in which arrangements had been made for the removal of offensive matter,
+which arrangements served also to distribute poison germs from one house
+to another, from one room to another.  These mansions had long suckers
+extended from one to another through the common sewer.  Through these
+suckers, commonly called “house drains,” they imbibed every taint which
+any one house in the system could supply.  In fact, arrangements were too
+often made which simply “laid on” poison to bed-rooms just as gas or
+water was laid on.  He had known an intelligent person declare that no
+harm could come up a certain pipe which ended in a bed-room, because
+nothing offensive went down.  That person had never realised the fact
+that his pipe joined another pipe, which again joined a sewer, which
+again whenever there was an epidemic in the neighbourhood, received
+innumerable poison germs; and that, although nothing more serious than
+scented soap and water went down, the germs of typhoid fever might any
+day come up.’
+
+Professor Jenkin then proceeded to show how a house might be absolutely
+cut off from all contamination from these sources of evil.  Then by means
+of large diagrams he showed the several systems of pipes within a house.
+One system coloured _red_ showed the pipes that received foul matter.  A
+system marked in _blue_ showed pipes used to ventilate this red system.
+The essential conditions of safety in the internal fittings of a house—it
+was inculcated—were that no air to be breathed, no water to be drunk,
+should ever be contaminated by connection with _red_ or _blue_ systems.
+Then in _yellow_ were shown the pipes which received dirty water, which
+was not necessarily foul.  Lastly a _white_ system, which under no
+circumstances must ever touch the ‘red,’ ‘blue,’ or ‘yellow’ systems.
+Such a diagram recalled the complicated anatomical drawings which
+illustrate the system of arteries and veins in the human frame.  Little
+wonder, then, that one gentleman remarked, in perplexity, that he had not
+room in his house for such a mass of pipes; but they were already there,
+with other pipes besides, all carefully hidden away, as in the human
+tenement, with the inevitable result—as the preacher of cleanliness and
+health declared—‘out of sight, out of mind.’
+
+In plain and forcible language were demonstrated the ills this product of
+modern life is heir to; and the drastic measures that most of them demand
+to secure the reputation of a healthy house.  Lastly the formation of an
+Association to carry out the idea (already sketched) cheaply, was briefly
+introduced.
+
+Next morning, January 23rd, was the moment chosen to lay the scheme
+formally before the public.  In all the Edinburgh newspapers, along with
+lengthy reports of the lecture, appeared, in form of an advertisement, a
+statement {295} of the scheme and its objects, supported by an imposing
+array of ‘Provisional Council.’  In due course several of the Scots
+newspapers and others, such as the _Building News_, gave leading
+articles, all of them directing attention to this new thing, as ‘an
+interesting experiment about to be tried in Edinburgh,’ ‘what promises to
+be a very useful sanitary movement, now being organised, and an example
+set that may be worthy of imitation elsewhere,’ and so on.
+
+Several of the writers waxed eloquent on the singular ingenuity of the
+scheme; the cheap professional advice to its adherents, &c.; and the rare
+advantages to be gained by means of co-operation and the traditional ‘one
+pound one.’
+
+The Provisional Council was absolutely representative of the community,
+and included names more than sufficient to inspire confidence.  It
+included the Lord-Lieutenant of the county, Lord Rosebery; the Lord
+Justice Clerk, Lord Moncrieff; the Lord Advocate; Sir Robert Christison;
+several of the Judges of the Court of Session; the Presidents of the
+Colleges of Physicians, and of Surgeons; many of the Professors of the
+University; the Bishop of Edinburgh, and the Dean; several of the best
+known of the Clergy of the Church of Scotland, Established, Free, and of
+other branches; one or two members of Parliament; more than one lady (who
+should have been perhaps mentioned earlier on this list) well known for
+large views and public spirit; several well-known country gentlemen; one
+or two distinguished civil engineers and architects; and many gentlemen
+of repute for intelligence and business qualities.
+
+Very soon after the second of the promised lectures, the members of the
+new Society began to be numbered by hundreds.  By the 28th of February,
+500 subscribers having been enrolled, they were in a position to hold
+their first regular meeting under the presidency of Sir Robert
+Christison, when a permanent Council composed of many of those who had
+from the first shown an interest in the movement—for example, Professor
+(now Sir Douglas) Maclagan and Lord Dean of Guild (now Sir James) Gowans,
+Professor Jenkin himself undertaking the duties of Consulting
+Engineer—were appointed.  And Jenkin was singularly fortunate in securing
+as Secretary the late Captain Charles Douglas, a worker as earnest as
+himself.  It was the theory of the originator that the Council, composed
+of leading men not necessarily possessed of engineering knowledge, should
+‘give a guarantee to the members that the officials employed should have
+been carefully selected, and themselves work under supervision.  Every
+householder in this town,’ he adds, ‘knows the names of the gentlemen
+composing our Council.’
+
+The new Association was a success alike in town and country.  Without
+going far into statistics it will be evident what scope there was, and
+is, for such operations when it is stated that last year (1885) 60 per
+cent. of the houses inspected in London and its neighbourhood were found
+to have foul air escaping direct into them, and 81 per cent. had their
+sanitary appliances in an unsatisfactory state.  Here in Edinburgh things
+were little, if any, better; as for the country houses, the descriptions
+of some were simply appalling.  As the new Association continued its
+operations it became the _rôle_ of the Consulting Engineer to note such
+objections, hypothetical or real, as were raised against the working of
+his scheme.  Some of these were ingenious enough: but all were replied to
+in order, and satisfactorily resolved.  It was shown, for example, that
+‘you might have a dinner party in your house on the day of your
+inspection’; that the Association worked in the utmost harmony with the
+city authorities, and with the tradesmen usually employed in such
+business; and that the officials were as ‘confidential’ as regards the
+infirmities of a house as any physician consulted by a patient.  The
+strength of the engineering staff has been varied from time to time as
+occasion required; at the moment of writing employment is found in
+Edinburgh and country districts in various parts of Scotland for five
+engineers temporarily or permanently engaged.
+
+The position Jenkin claimed for the Engineers was a high one, but not too
+high: thus he well defined it:—
+
+    ‘In respect of Domestic Sanitation the business of the Engineer and
+    that of the medical man overlap; for while it is the duty of the
+    engineer to learn from the doctor what conditions are necessary to
+    secure health, the engineer may, nevertheless, claim in his turn the
+    privilege of assisting in the warfare against disease by using his
+    professional skill to determine what mechanical and constructive
+    arrangements are best adapted to secure these conditions.’ {299}
+
+Flattery in the form of imitation followed in due course.  A branch was
+established at St. Andrews, and one of the earliest of similar
+institutions was founded at Newport in the United States.  Another sprang
+up at Wolverhampton.  In 1881 two such societies were announced as having
+been set on foot in London.  And the _Times_ of April 14th, in a leading
+article of some length, drew attention to the special features of the
+plan which it was stated had followed close upon a paper read by
+Professor Fleeming Jenkin before the Society of Arts in the preceding
+month of January.  The adherents included such names as those of Sir
+William Gull, Professor Huxley, Professor Burdon Sanderson, and Sir
+Joseph Fayrer.  The _Saturday Review_, in January, had already in a
+characteristic article enforced the principles of the scheme, and shown
+how, for a small annual payment, ‘the helpless and hopeless condition of
+the householder at the mercy of the plumber’ might be for ever changed.
+
+The London Association, established on the lines of the parent society,
+has been followed by many others year by year; amongst these are
+Bradford, Cheltenham, Glasgow, and Liverpool in 1882; Bedford, Brighton,
+and Newcastle in 1883; Bath, Cambridge, Cardiff, Dublin, and Dundee in
+1884; and Swansea in 1885; and while we write the first steps are being
+taken, with help from Edinburgh, to establish an association at Montreal;
+sixteen Associations.
+
+Almost, it may be said, a bibliography has been achieved for Fleeming
+Jenkin’s movement.
+
+In 1878 was published _Healthy Houses_ (Edin., David Douglas), being the
+substance of the two lectures already mentioned as having been delivered
+in Edinburgh with the intention of laying open the idea of the scheme
+then in contemplation, with a third addressed to the Medico-Chirurgical
+Society.  This book has been long out of print, and such has been the
+demand for it that the American edition {300} is understood to be also
+out of print, and unobtainable.
+
+In 1880 was printed (London, Spottiswoode & Co.) a pamphlet entitled
+_What is the Best Mode of Amending the Present Laws with Reference to
+Existing Buildings_, _and also of Improving their Sanitary Condition with
+due Regard to Economical Considerations_?—the substance of a paper read
+by Professor Jenkin at the Congress of the Social Science Association at
+Edinburgh in October of that year.
+
+The first item of _Health Lectures for the People_ (Edin., 1881) consists
+of a discourse on the ‘Care of the Body’ delivered by Professor Jenkin in
+the Watt Institution at Edinburgh, in which the theories of house
+sanitation are dwelt on.
+
+_House Inspection_, reprinted from the _Sanitary Record_, was issued in
+pamphlet form in 1882.  And another small tract, _Houses of the Poor_;
+_their Sanitary Arrangement_, in 1885.
+
+In this connection it may be said that while the idea formulated by
+Jenkin has been carried out with a measure of success that could hardly
+have been foreseen, in one point only, it may be noted, has expectation
+been somewhat disappointed as regards the good that these Associations
+should have effected—and the fact was constantly deplored by the
+founder—namely, the comparative failure as a means of improving the
+condition of the dwellings of the poorer classes.  It was ‘hoped that
+charity and public spirit would have used the Association to obtain
+reports on poor tenements, and to remedy the most glaring evils.’ {301}
+
+The good that these associations have effected is not to be estimated by
+the numbers of their membership.  They have educated the public on
+certain points.  The fact that they exist has become generally known,
+and, by consequence, persons of all classes are induced to satisfy
+themselves of the reasons for the existence of such institutions, and
+thus they learn of the evils that have called them into being.
+
+Builders, burgh engineers, and private individuals in any way connected
+with the construction of dwellings in town or country have been put upon
+their mettle, and constrained to keep themselves abreast with the
+wholesome truths which the engineering staff of all these Sanitary
+Associations are the means of disseminating.
+
+In this way, doubtless, some good may indirectly have been done to poorer
+tenements, though not exactly in the manner contemplated by the founder.
+
+Now, if it be true that Providence helps those who help themselves,
+surely a debt of gratitude is due to him who has placed (as has been
+attempted to be shown in this brief narrative) the means of self-help and
+the attainment of a palpable benefit within the reach of all through the
+working of a simple plan, whose motto well may be, ‘Healthy Houses’; and
+device a strangled snake.
+
+                                                                     A. F.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{113}  _Reminiscences of My Later Life_, by Mary Howitt, _Good Words_,
+May 1886.
+
+{288}  See paper read at the Congress of the Social Science Association,
+Edinburgh, October 8, 1880.
+
+{290}  It was ultimately agreed not to appoint an officer of this kind
+till occasion should arise for his services; none has been appointed.
+
+{295}  Briefly stated, the points submitted in this prospectus were
+these:
+
+1.  That the proposed Association was a Society for the benefit of its
+members and the community that cannot be used for any purposes of profit.
+
+2.  The privileges of members include the annual inspection of their
+premises, as well as a preliminary report on their condition with an
+estimate of the cost of any alterations recommended.
+
+3.  The skilled inspection from time to time of drains and all sanitary
+arrangements.
+
+4.  No obligation on the part of members to carry out any of the
+suggestions made by the engineers of the Association, who merely give
+skilled advice when such is desired.
+
+5.  The officers of the Association to have no interest in any outlay
+recommended.
+
+6.  The Association might be of great service to the poorer members of
+the community.
+
+{299}  _Healthy Houses_, by Professor Fleeming Jenkin, p. 54.
+
+{300}  It is perhaps worth mentioning as a curiosity of literature that
+the American publishers who produced this book in the States, without
+consulting the author, afterwards sent him a handsome cheque, of course
+unsolicited by him.
+
+{301}  It is true, handsome tenements for working people have been built,
+such as the picturesque group of houses erected with this object by a
+member of the Council of the Edinburgh Sanitary Association, at Bell’s
+Mills, so well seen from the Dean Bridge, where every appliance that
+science can suggest has been made use of.  But for the ordinary houses of
+the poor the advice of the Association’s engineers has been but rarely
+taken advantage of.
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN***
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