96 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



could afford no servant. The two men, also, found the 

 practical drudgery of the farm work very different from 

 the idyllic occupation which it had seemed in fancy, and 

 through the pleasant telescopes of hope and romance. 

 Their hands grew blistered with the axe and the plough ; 

 their backs ached with the unwonted stooping and strain- 

 ing ; no intellectual companionships brightened their 

 evening hours ; their neighbours, few and far between, were 

 vulgar and sordid, sharp and mean ; they saw no books, 

 save those they had brought with them. So far as my 

 father was concerned, this painful isolation from the outer 

 world of man, though disagreeable, was not harmful. It 

 thrust him more and more on the society of nature. 

 Entomology had been his pastime ; it was now his only 

 resource, and what had been a condiment and the salt of 

 life grew now to be its very pabulum. The toil at the 

 plough was harsh and exhausting, but not nearly enough 

 so to dim his intellectual curiosity. His mind, the tendency 

 of which was always to flow in a deep and narrow channel, 

 concentrated all its forces in the prosecution of zoological 

 research. In summer, as soon as his labour in the fields 

 was over, he would instantly sally back to the margins of 

 the forest, insect-net in hand, all fatigue forgotten in one 

 flapping of a purple wing. His entomological journals, 

 continued throughout the whole of his residence in Canada, 

 are a memorial of his unflagging industry and success in 

 the pursuit of science. It was these journals which later 

 on formed the basis of his first published volume, The 

 Canadian Naturalist of 1840. 



The toil would have been less difficult to endure, if the 

 returns had been commensurate. But in these, as in almost 

 everything else (except the butterflies), the emigrants were 

 grievously disappointed. Their neighbours described their 

 first season as abnormally unpropitious ; frosts came un- 



