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Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

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 
all<EFBFBD>mes 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 entr<74>mes 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 sembl<62>t 
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<72>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