JAMES BACKHOUSE. 57 
population seemed to rest. Out of very scanty resources he had built 
a chapel and a school-house, and now he wished to establish a reading- 
room for the grown-up young men, We had an introduction to this 
minister, and called upon him the evening after our arrival, and talked 
about the village and its condition, and took his advice (and very 
good advice we found it) as to the best botanizing ground in the 
neighbourhood. After expressing his sympathy with him at parting, 
my companion said, “I hope thou wilt write and tell me how the 
reading-room goes on." That was all I knew at the time ; but after a 
few years this minister died and his biography was published, and I 
read in his address at the opening of the reading-room the sequel of 
our conversation,—how that out of £118 which the room had cost, 
Mr. Backhouse had gathered and sent £45. 
He kept his activity of body and mind scarcely impaired till past 70 ; 
but, after this, attacks of intermittent angina pectoris obliged him to 
restrict his jouneys, and incapacitated him from mountain-climbing. 
The last time we called upon him, about a year ago, though we found 
him very feeble in body, he was able to go with us round his garden, 
and was as interested and enthusiastic as of old in showing us his ac- 
quisitions, and was reading the Duke of Argyll’s * Reign of Law’ 
with warm approbation, and writing out for a journal the notes which 
it suggested. Since, just after his return from the Cape, he at our first 
meeting laid his hand upon the head of the writer of this notice, then 
a little boy at school, with ** Mind and get up to the top of the class ; 
the finest apples always grow high up on the tree ;" and a few years later 
encouraged him iu botany at a time when he had no one else to encou- 
rage him, and gave him the first set of Highland plants which he pos- 
sessed,—we have had the privilege of a continuous acquaintance with 
him ; have stayed at his house, and received him as a guest at our 
own; have been lost with him in mountain mists, and stranded with 
-him in the parlours of little country inns in pouring rain; have had 
his sympathy in times of rejoieing and misfortune; have heard him 
rivet the attention of crowded meetings in London by his words of 
earnest patriarchal authority, and rivet no less the attention of a room- 
ful of rough uneducated Yorkshire men and women by his pithy anec- 
dotes, with teetotalism as the moral of the story, and his shrewd 
straightforward common-sense. And we bear our testimony, now that 
he is gone, to his thoroughness and his consistency in all these so varied 
VOL. VII. [FEBRUARY 1, 1868.] F 
