I08 REMINISCENCES. 



letting her lick him, and speaking to her with a peculiarly 

 tender, caressing voice. 



My father had the power of giving to these summer holi- 

 days a charm which was strongly felt by all his family. The 

 pressure of his work at home kept him at the utmost stretch 

 of his powers of endurance, and when released from it, he 

 entered on a holiday with a youthfulness of enjoyment that 

 made his companionship delightful ; we felt that we saw more 

 of him in a week's holiday than in a month at home. 



Some of these absences from home, however, had a de- 

 pressing effect on him ; when he had been previously much 

 overworked it seemed as though the absence of the custom- 

 ary strain allowed him to fall into a peculiar condition of 

 miserable health. 



Besides the holidays which I have mentioned, there were 

 his visits to water-cure establishments. In 1849, when very 

 ill, suffering from constant sickness, he was urged by a friend 

 to try the water-cure, and at last agreed to go to Dr. Gully's 

 establishment at Malvern. His letters to Mr. Fox show how 

 much good the treatment did him ; he seems to have thought 

 that he had found a cure for his troubles, but, like all other 

 remedies, it had only a transient effect on him. However, he 

 found it, sit first, so good for him that when he came home 

 he built himself a douche-bath, and the butler learnt to be 

 his bathman. 



He paid many visits to Moor Park, Dr. Lane's water-cure 

 establishment in Surrey, not far from Aldershot. These visits 

 were pleasant ones, and he always looked back to them with 

 pleasure. Dr. Lane has given his recollections of my father 

 in Dr. Richardson's * Lecture on Charles Darwin,' October 

 22, 1882, from which I quote : — 



" In a public institution like mine, he was surrounded, of 

 course, by multifarious types of character, by persons of both 

 sexes, mostly very different from himself — commonplace peo- 

 ple, in short, as the majority are everywhere, but like to him 

 at least in this, that they were fellow-creatures and fellow- 



