CHAPTER IV. 



1859-1868. 



Fleeming's Marriage His Married Life Professional Difficulties Life at 

 Claygate Illness of Mrs. F. Jenkin and of Fleeming Appointment to 

 the Chair at Edinburgh. 



ON Saturday, Feb. 26, 1859, profiting by a holiday of four days, Fleem- 

 Fleeming was married to Miss Austin at Northiam : a place Carriage, 

 connected not only with his own family but with that of his 

 bride as well. By Tuesday morning, he was at work again, 

 fitting out cableships at Birkenhead. Of the walk from his 

 lodgings to the works, I find a graphic sketch in one of his 

 letters : ' Out over the railway bridge, along a wide road raised 

 to the level of a ground floor above the land, which, not being 

 built upon, harbours puddles, ponds, pigs, and Irish hovels ; so 

 to the dock warehouses, four huge piles of building with no 

 windows, surrounded by a wall about twelve feet high; in 

 through the large gates, round which hang twenty or thirty 

 rusty Irish, playing pitch and toss and waiting for employment ; 

 on along the railway, which came in at the same gates and 

 which branches down between each vast block past a pilot- 

 engine butting refractory trucks into their places on to the 

 last block, [and] down the branch, sniffing the guano-scented 

 air and detecting the old bones. The hartshorn flavour of the 

 guano becomes very strong, as I near the docks where, across 

 the Elba's decks, a huge vessel is discharging her cargo of the 

 brown dust, and where huge vessels have been discharging that 

 same cargo for the last five months.' This was the walk he 

 took his young wife on the morrow of his return. She had 

 been used to the society of lawyers and civil servants, moving 

 in that circle which seems to itself the pivot of the nation and 



