152 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY cHAP. VI 



He reiterates his distress at not getting letters 

 from his wife : " Certainly I will never run the risk 

 of being so long without — never again." When, after 

 all, the delayed letters reached him on his way back 

 from the expedition to the Canadas, thanks to a 

 traveller who brought them up from Laguna, he 

 writes (April 24) : — 



Catcli me going out of reach of letters again. I have 

 been horridly anxious. Nobody — children or any one 

 else — can be to me what you are. Uly&ses preferred his 

 old woman to immortality, and this absence has led me 

 to see that he was as wise in that as in other things. . . . 



-■o'^ 



Here is a novel description of an hotel at Puerto 

 Orotava : — ■ 



It is very pretty to look at, but aU draughts. 1 

 compare it to the air of a big wash-house with all the 

 doors open, and it was agreed that the likeness was exact- 



On May 2 he sailed for Madeira by the German^ 

 feeling already " ten years younger " for his holiday. 

 On the 3rd he writes : — 



The last time I was in this place was in 1846. All 

 my Life lies between the two visits. I was then twenty- 

 one and a half, and I shall be sixty- five to-morrow. The 

 place looks to me to have grown a good deal, but I believe 

 it is chiefly English residents whose villas dot the hill. 

 There were no roads forty-four years ago. Now there is 

 one, I am told, to Camera do Lobos nearly five miles long. 

 That is the measure of Portuguese progress in half a 

 century. Moreover, the men have left off wearing their 

 pigtail caps and the women their lioods. 



