lii MEMOIR 



at-arms, many retire mortified and ruffled ; but Fleeming had 

 no sooner left the house than he fell into delighted admiration 

 of the spirit of his adversaries. From that it was but a step to 

 ask himself ' what truth was sticking in their heads ; ' for even 

 the falsest form of words (in Fleeming's life-long opinion) re- 

 posed upon some truth, just as he could ' not even allow that 

 people admire ugly things, they admire what is pretty in the 

 ugly thing.' And before he sat down to write his letter, he 

 thought he had hit upon the explanation. ' I fancy the true 

 idea,' he wrote, l is that you must never do yourself or anyone 

 else a moral injury make any man a thief or a liar for any 

 end ; ' quite a different thing, as he would have loved to point 

 out, from never stealing or lying. But this perfervid disputant 

 was not always out of key with his audience. One whom he 

 met in the same house announced that she would never again 

 be happy. i What does that signify ? ' cried Fleeming. ' We 

 are not here to be happy but to be good.' And the words (as 

 his hearer writes to me) became to her a sort of motto during 

 life. 



Fleeming From Fairbairn's and Manchester, Fleeming passed to a 



at Green- ra ii wav survey in Switzerland, and thence again to Mr. Penn's 

 at Greenwich, where he was engaged as draughtsman. There 

 in 1856, we find him in ' a terribly busy state, finishing up 

 engines for innumerable gun-boats and steam frigates for the 

 ensuing campaign.' From half-past eight in the morning till 

 nine or ten at night, he worked in a crowded office among un- 

 congenial comrades, ' saluted by chaff, generally low personal 

 and not witty,' pelted with oranges and apples, regaled with 

 dirty stories, and seeking to suit himself with his surroundings 

 or (as he writes it) trying to be as little like himself as possible. 

 His lodgings were hard by ' across a dirty green and through 

 some half-built streets of two storied houses ; ' he had Carlyle 

 and the poets, engineering and mathematics, to study by him- 

 self in such spare time as remained to him ; and there were 

 several ladies, young and not so young, with whom he liked to 

 correspond. But not all of these could compensate for the 

 absence of that mother, who had made herself so large a figure 



