94 Life and Letters of Francis Gallon 



only 94°. Are you aware that when the temperature of the air exceeds that of blood heat 

 it is apt to be trying?' (I could quite believe it !) By and bye he asked me whether 

 it would not be pleasant to wash our face- and hands ] I certainly thought so, but did 

 not see how it was to be done. Then, with perfect simplicity and sublime disregard of 

 appearances and of the astounded looks of the other occupants of our compartment, 

 a very much ' got-iip ' Frenchman and two fashionably dressed Frenchwomen, lie 

 proceeded to twist his newspaper into the shape of a washhand basin, produced an 

 intinitesimally small bit of soap, and poured some water out of a medicine-bottle, and 

 we performed our ablutions. I fear I was too self-conscious to enjoy the proceedings, 

 but it never seemed to occur to him that he was doing anything unusual ! " 



It needed African travel to enable Francis Galton to throw off 

 a certain self- consciousness ; I have heard acquaintances, who knew 

 perhaps little of his true simplicity and his width of toleration when 

 intellectual values were under consideration, speak of hira as conven- 

 tional. He belonged, indeed, to an old-fashioned school, which liked 

 good manners, which preferred its women to be pretty and dress 

 gracefully, and which appreciated without worshipping the conveniences 

 of wealth. But these conventional things were for him but grease to 

 the wheels of life, to be put aside, whenever they interfered with the 

 greater aims of existence. He might not have found it as easy as 

 W. Kingdon Cliffoi'd did, to call in at the butcher's and walk home 

 with a leg of mutton under his arm, but assuredly if "Universe" were 

 to be solved on the homeward walk, he would have kept Clifford 

 company regardless of the joint. Francis Galton's conventionality in 

 boyhood and youth was largely shyness and self-consciousness — in 

 manhood it was a traditional courtliness not without its protective 

 advantages, and wholly disappearing before the warmth of his affection, 

 when acquaintance had ripened into intimate friendship. 



Our youthful travellers voyaged down the Thames and across to 

 Antwerp, thence to Brussels, Mechlin and Liege (see Plate XLIX). 

 Many of the letters to his father Tertius tell us of the usual travellers' 

 sights, the churches, the pictures and museums, but occasionally we 

 pass to things more suggestive, as the ornithological and geological 

 collections at Brussels, and then to the first pleasures of the Rhine, and 

 of the strangeness of foreign life. 



"I really am quite full of obligations to you for letting me take this trip. I have 

 been as happy as possible. You must excuse my writing longer letters, as after being 

 out all day, coming into the coffee-room tired, you are stupefied with baccy smoke puffed 

 out of the moutlis of some 60 people. Then writing a long journal, it is rather tiring." 



