8o A Century of Family Letters [CHAP, v 



world, I know he was the one he thought highest of. He 

 was speaking even in his last illness of the natural attraction 

 he felt towards him, and lamented it was so little the mode 

 among Englishmen to write to each other. " Now," he 

 said, ' I should have liked to have been in regular corre- 

 spondence with Mr Jos, but I did not venture to ask him, 

 I am sure he would not have liked it." He then drew a 

 character of him with such warmth and truth I regret I had 

 not taken it down. 



In the autumn of 1 842, Hensleigh Wedgwood had a long 

 illness. Emma, to relieve the strain, took care of three of 

 his children, Snow aged nine, Bro eight, and Erny five. 

 These children with her own two, Doddy aged three, and 

 Annie two, were sent out walking, under the care of a 

 nursery rnaid, almost a child herself. The result was they 

 all got lost in what we called the ' Big Woods " a mass 

 of hazel-copse with occasional oaks, and traversed by narrow 

 footpaths. It was wintry weather and snow was lying on 

 the ground. 



Emma Darwin to her Sister-in-law Mrs Hensleigh 



Wedgwood. 



Sunday [DOWN, 6th Nov. 1842]. 



. . . Snow mil tell you of our agitation of the children 

 losing their way. I was afraid of nothing worse but their 

 all sitting down to cry together. They had only Bessy 

 with them, and Snow and Doddy missed the rest somehow 

 and she brought him home from more than a mile off, 

 dragging him along up to their ankles in mud. She kept 

 him from being frightened or crying and from crying herself, 

 and behaved like a little heroine. Charles and Par slow met 

 them a short way from home and learnt as much as Snow 

 could tell them of where the others were. They then found 

 that Bessie and Annie and the two boys had been enquiring 

 at a farm-house, and in about half-an-hour Charles found 

 them and took them in to the farm-house for a slight 

 refection, and got a man to carry Erny on his back and 



