Alfred Russel Wallace 



brought home a beetle, to the great horror of the servant. 

 Passing at the moment, he picked it np, saying, '' Why, it 

 is quite a harmless little creature ! " and to demonstrate its 

 inoffensiveness he placed it on the tip of his nose, where- 

 upon it immediately bit him and even drew blood, much to 

 our amusment and his own astonishment. On another 

 occasion he was sitting with a book on the lawn under 

 the oak tree when suddenly a large creature alighted 

 upon his shoulder. Looking round, he saw a fine speci- 

 2aen of the ring-tailed lemur, of whose existence in the 

 neighbourhood he had no knowledge, though it belonged 

 to some neighbours about a quarter of a mile away. It 

 seemed appropriate that the animal should have selected 

 for its attentions the one person in the district who would 

 not be alarmed at the sudden appearance of a strange 

 animal upon his shoulder. Needless to say, it was quite 

 friendly. 



A year or so before we left Godalming he enlarged the 

 house and altered the garden. But his health not having 

 been very good, causing him a good deal of trouble with 

 his eyes, and having more or less exhausted the possibili- 

 ties of the garden, he decided to leave Godalming and find 

 a new house in a milder climate. So in 1889 he finally fixed 

 upon a small house at Parkstone in Dorset. 



Planning and constructing houses, gardens, walls, paths, 

 rockeries, etc., were great hobbies of his, and he often spent 

 hours making scale drawings of some new house or of altera- 

 tions to an existing one, and scheming out the details of con- 

 struction. At other times he would devise schemes for new 

 rockeries or waterworks, and he would always talk them over 

 with us and tell us of some splendid new idea he had hit upon. 

 As Mr. Sharpe has noted, he was always very optimistic, and 

 if a scheme did not come up to his expectations he was not 

 discouraged but always declared he could do it much better 



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