145 



A few months after his marriage he went to live at Rudloe 

 Cottage, Rudloe Firs, near Box, a place probably known to some of 

 the Members of this Club, though the house is now pulled down. 

 Thence, in 1844, he moved, for nine months, to Wraxall Lodge, 

 near Bristol, and thence again for a few years to Clifton, where 

 he became very intimate with Thwaites, a botanist of high 

 reputation and well known in the botanical world, and who was 

 afterwards Curator of the Botanical Gardens in Ceylon. I 

 suspect it was at this time that he began to give especial attention, 

 to the Fungi, as he is said " to have made, with Thwaites, many- 

 expeditions in the neighbourhood in search of truffles." It was- 

 in November, 1848, that Broome took up his abode at Elmhurst, 

 near Bath, where he remained for the rest of his life. 



I would now speak of my own acquaintance with Broome, who 

 was the oldest friend I had — relatives apart. It arose out of the 

 circumstance mentioned above, of his coming to be the pupil of a 

 clergyman who was curate in the next parish to my own 

 vicarage of Swaffham Bulbeck, in Cambridgeshire. I waa 

 intimate with the tutor, and I soon became intimate with tht 

 pupil, especially when I found him taking an interest in Natural 

 History, for which he seemed to have a latent taste, only waiting 

 to be evoked according as circumstances were more or less 

 favourable. And circumstances certainly did favour him ; for the 

 tutor himself, under whom he was placed, was fond of collecting 

 fossils and rare plants for his garden, independent of my own 

 Natural History pursuits, which 1 had taken up many years 

 before the pupil came. 



Nor could any young naturalist have been placed in a richer or 

 more attractive neighbourhood, in a Natural History point of 

 view, than that in which Broome found himself. Newmarket 

 Heath, with its wide expanse of unenclosed land, crossed by the 

 Devil's Ditch, an earthwork of the Saxon age, running for seven 

 miles, and only disturbed in places ; this Ditch terminating at one 

 extremity in the Woodlands, at the other in the Fens, the latter 



