196 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



" shall not fail to renew my intercourse with you, if 

 " you should in any further communication desire it. 



w With much respect, pray believe me to be, dear sir, 

 " Very faithfully yours, 



"Richard Hill." 



This was the opening passage in one of the warmest 

 and most intimate friendships of my father's life, assidu- 

 ously cultivated long after his departure from Jamaica, 

 and not wholly interrupted until the death of Mr. Hill. In 

 1 85 1, when sending the preface of his Naturalist's Sojourn 

 in Jamaica to the press, Philip Gosse wrote that he con- 

 sidered it "one of the happiest reminiscences of a visit 

 unusually pleasant, that it gave him the acquaintance of a 

 gentleman whose talents and acquirements would have 

 done honour to any country, but whose excellences as a 

 man of science, as a gentleman, and as a Christian, shine 

 with peculiar lustre in the comparative seclusion of his 

 native island ; " and he insisted, in the face of his friend's 

 modest entreaties, in appending the words "assisted by 

 Richard Hill " to the title-page of each of his own Jamaica 

 volumes. They did not meet till 1846, on an occasion 

 which shall presently be described. 



In October, 1845, Gosse had occasion to visit the north 

 coast of the island of Jamaica, his friend Mr. Deleon 

 offering him a seat in his gig. He had thus the oppor- 

 tunity of crossing the country twice, and of seeing the 

 interior to advantage ; but he found it, from the scientific 

 point of view, disappointing. They passed, among other 

 things, the remote plantation of Shuttlewood, remarkable 

 from the circumstance that it was here that a bag of grass 

 seed, brought from Africa to be the food for a cage of 

 finches, was emptied out upon the fertile soil, and in due 

 time became the nucleus from which guinea-grass, one of 



