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+***The Project Gutenberg Etext of Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin***
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+Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin
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+by Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+October, 1996  [Etext #698]
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+Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson
+Scanned and proofed by David Price
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin
+
+
+
+
+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 
+PROTHEE, 64, that the lad made his only campaign.  It was in the 
+days of Rodney's war, when the PROTHEE, 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 PROTHEE, 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 
+60,000L., 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 MYself!'  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 Francais peints par euxmemes." . . .  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. Honore; 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 DETOUR, 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 "HOTEL 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 REFORME!"  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 Francais, 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 fenetres!" 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 EMPLOYE 
+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 PROTEGE, 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 AGAMEMMON 
+(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 E 
+SCALTRO PARGO-LETTO"; 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 1823; 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 formulae 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'; 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-RIMES 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-a-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 today, 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, oistus, arbor vitae 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 FAINEANT.  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 cure'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 Genois [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 cafes.  
+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 cafe, 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 
+cafe; and all the shops shut from 10 to 2; and the post does not 
+open till 12; and there was a road to Fort Genois, only a bridge 
+had been carried away, &c.  At last I got off, and we rowed round 
+to Fort Genois, 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]
+
+instead of taut, thus
+
+[Picture]
+
+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 Genois 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. x 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 
+manoeuvre.  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 VITAE - 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. 
+Trelat.
+
+
+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. 15TH, 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. 17TH. - 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 9TH. - Frewen is deep in parachutes.  I beg him not to drop 
+from the top landing in one of his own making.'
+
+'JUNE 6TH, 1876. - Frewen's crank axle is a failure just at present 
+- but he bears up.'
+
+'JUNE 14TH. - 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 18TH. - 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 27TH. - I do not see what I could do without Austin.  He 
+talks so pleasantly and is so truly good all through.'
+
+'JUNE 27TH. - 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. 18TH, 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. 19TH. - 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 onto 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 Schutzen-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 GRAFIN' 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 SCHON.'  
+Joseph's cousin, Walpurga Moser, to an orchestra of clarionet and 
+zither, taught the family the country dances, the Steierisch and 
+the Landler, 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 cafe, 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 TRACHINIAE, 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 AEschylus 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 TRACHINIAE, 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 chiton, 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 SAUL, 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, AEschylus, 
+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 Trelat's.  Here, admirably 
+expressed, is how he appeared to a friend of another nation, whom 
+he encountered only late in life.  M. Trelat 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. Trelat 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'etait en Mai 
+1878.  Nous etions tous deux membres du jury de l'Exposition 
+Universelle.  On n'avait rien fait qui vaille a la premiere seance 
+de notre classe, qui avait eu lieu le matin.  Tout le monde avait 
+parle et reparle pour ne rien dire.  Cela durait depuis huit 
+heures; il etait midi.  Je demandai la parole pour une motion 
+d'ordre, et je proposai que la seance fut levee a la condition que 
+chaque membre francais, EMPORTAT a dejeuner un jure etranger.  
+Jenkin applaudit.  'Je vous emimene dejeuner,' lui criai-je.  'Je 
+veux bien.' . . . Nous partimes; en chemin nous vous rencontrions; 
+il vous presente et nous allons dejeuner tous trois aupres du 
+Trocadero.
+
+Et, depuis ce temps, nous avons ete de vieux amis.  Non seulement 
+nous passions nos journees au jury, ou nous etions toujours 
+ensemble, cote-a-cote.  Mais nos habitudes s'etaient faites telles 
+que, non contents de dejeuner en face l'un de l'autre, je le 
+ramenais diner presque tous les jours chez moi.  Cela dura une 
+quinzaine:  puis il fut rappele en Angleterre.  Mais il revint, et 
+nous fimes encore une bonne etape de vie intellectuelle, morale et 
+philosophique.  Je crois qu'il me rendait deja tout ce que 
+j'eprouvais de sympathie et d'estime, et que je ne fus pas pour 
+rien dans son retour a Paris.
+
+Chose singuliere! nous nous etions attaches l'un a l'autre par les 
+sous-entendus bien plus que par la matiere de nos conversations.  A 
+vrai dire, nous etions presque toujours en discussion; et il nous 
+arrivait de nous rire au nez l'un et l'autre pendant des heures, 
+tant nous nous etonnions reciproquement de la diversite de nos 
+points de vue.  Je le trouvais si Anglais, et il me trouvais si 
+Francais!  Il etait si franchement revolte de certaines choses 
+qu'il voyait chez nous, et je comprenais si mal certaines choses 
+qui se passaient chez vous!  Rien de plus interessant que ces 
+contacts qui etaient des contrastes, et que ces rencontres d'idees 
+qui etaient des choses; rien de si attachant que les echappees de 
+coeur ou d'esprit auxquelles ces petits conflits donnaient a tout 
+moment cours.  C'est dans ces conditions que, pendant son sejour a 
+Paris en 1878, je conduisis un peu partout mon nouvel ami.  Nous 
+allƒmes chez Madame Edmond Adam, ou il vit passer beaucoup d'hommes 
+politiques avec lesquels il causa.  Mais c'est chez les ministres 
+qu'il fut interesse.  Le moment etait, d'ailleurs, curieux en 
+France.  Je me rappelle que, lorsque je le presentai au Ministre du 
+Commerce, il fit cette spirituelle repartie:  'C'est la seconde 
+fois que je viens en France sous la Republique.  La premiere fois, 
+c'etait en 1848, elle s'etait coiffee 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 Rosiere 
+de Nanterre.  Il y suivit les ceremonies civiles et religieuses; il 
+y assista au banquet donne par le Maire; il y vit notre de Lesseps, 
+auquel il porta un toast.  Le soir, nous revinmes tard a Paris; il 
+faisait chaud; nous etions un peu fatigues; nous entrƒmes dans un 
+des rares cafes encore ouverts.  Il devint silencieux. - 'N'etes-
+vous pas content de votre journee?' lui dis-je. - 'O, si! mais je 
+reflechis, et je me dis que vous etes un peuple gai - tous ces 
+braves gens etaient gais aujourd'hui.  C'est une vertu, la gaiete, 
+et vous l'avez en France, cette vertu!'  Il me disait cela 
+melancoliquement; et c'etait la premiere fois que je lui entendais 
+faire une louange adressee a la France. . . . Mais il ne faut pas 
+que vous voyiez la une plainte de ma part.  Je serais un ingrat si 
+je me plaignais; car il me disait souvent:  'Quel bon Francais vous 
+faites!'  Et il m'aimait a cause de cela, quoiqu'il semblƒt 
+n'ainier pas la France.  C'etait la un trait de son originalite.  
+Il est vrai qu'il s'en tirait en disant que je ne ressemblai pas a 
+mes compatriotes, ce a quoi il ne connaissait rien! - Tout cela 
+etait fort curieux; car, moi-meme, je l'aimais quoiqu'il en e–t a 
+mon pays!
+
+En 1879 il amena son fils Austin a Paris.  J'attirai celui-ci.  Il 
+dejeunait avec moi deux fois par semaine.  Je lui montrai ce 
+qu'etait l'intimite francaise en le tutoyant paternellement.  Cela 
+reserra beaucoup nos liens d'intimite avec Jenkin. . . . Je fis 
+inviter mon ami au congres de l'ASSOCIATION FRANCAISE POUR 
+L'AVANCEMENT DES SCIENCES, qui se tenait a Rheims en 1880.  Il y 
+vint.  J'eus le plaisir de lui donner la parole dans la section du 
+genie civil et militaire, que je presidais.  II y fit une tres 
+interessante communication, qui me montrait une fois de plus 
+l'originalite de ses vaes et la s–rete de sa science.  C'est a 
+l'issue de ce congres que je passai lui faire visite a Rochefort, 
+ou je le trouvai installe en famille et ou je presentai pour la 
+premiere fois mes hommages a son eminente compagne.  Je le vis la 
+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 a sa personne.  J'emportai des quelques heures que 
+je passai a cote de lui dans ce charmant paysage un souvenir emu.
+
+J'etais alle 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 collegues; car il etait fondateur d'une 
+societe de salubrite.  Il eut un grand succes parmi nous.  Mais ce 
+voyaye me restera toujours en memoire parce que c'est la que se 
+fixa defenitivement notre forte amitie.  Il m'invita un jour a 
+diner a son club et au moment de me faire asseoir a cote 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'etait une 
+victoire, dont je serais fier toute ma vie.  Et nous commencions a 
+user de cette nouvelle forme dans nos rapports.  Vous savez avec 
+quelle finesse il parlait le francais:  comme il en connaissait 
+tous les tours, comme il jouait avec ses difficultes, et meme avec 
+ses petites gamineries.  Je crois qu'il a ete heureux de pratiquer 
+avec moi ce tutoiement, qui ne s'adapte pas a l'anglais, et qui est 
+si francais.  Je ne puis vous peindre l'etendue et la variete de 
+nos conversations de la soiree.  Mais ce que je puis vous dire, 
+c'est que, sous la caresse du TU, nos idees se sont elevees.  Nous 
+avions toujours beaucoup ri ensemble; mais nous n'avions jamais 
+laisse des banalites s'introduire dans nos echanges de pensees.  Ce 
+soir-la, notre horizon intellectual s'est elargie, et nous y avons 
+pousse des reconnaissances profondes et lointaines.  Apres avoir 
+vivement cause a table, nous avons longuement cause au salon; et 
+nous nous separions le soir a Trafalgar Square, apres avoir longe 
+les trotters, stationne aux coins des rues et deux fois rebrousse 
+chemie en nous reconduisant l'un l'autre.  Il etait pres d'une 
+heure du matin!  Mais quelle belle passe d'argumentation, quels 
+beaux echanges de sentiments, quelles fortes confidences 
+patriotiques nous avions fournies!  J'ai compris ce soir la que 
+Jenkin ne detestait pas la France, et je lui serrai fort les mains 
+en l'embrassant.  Nous nous quittions aussi amis qu'on puisse 
+l'etre; et notre affection s'etait par lui etendue et comprise dans 
+un TU francais.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. 1875-1885.
+
+
+
+Mr 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 PROTHEE, 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 re‰nacted 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.
+
+
+
+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 'Encyclopaedia 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 'Encyclopaedia' 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 'Encyclopaedia' 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 
+'Encyclopaedia 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.
+
+[This appendix is not included in the Project Gutenberg eText 
+because the UK volunteer could not locate a date of death for Lt. 
+Col. Alexander Fergusson - this is necessary for UK copyright 
+reasons.  If anyone could help with this information please contact 
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin
+
+
+
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