LITERARY WORK IN DEVONSHIRE. 293 



until Christmas, i860, but it was finished in the preceding 

 March. My father had now for three years been settled 

 in the west, and he was growing more and more, as he 

 expressed it himself, a " troglodyte," a dweller in a cave. 

 The composition of the Actinologia Britannica had forced 

 him into correspondence with a large circle of strangers, 

 and had kept his human sympathies alive. But after the 

 publication of that work, a kind of inertia began to creep 

 over him, and he dropped his correspondents one by one. 

 Even Charles Kingsley, with whom he had enjoyed so 

 long and close communion of interests, seemed to lose hold 

 over him. His household consisted, at this time, of his 

 aged mother, whom he had brought down into Devonshire 

 in March, 1858 ; his little son ; and Miss Andrews, a lady 

 who undertook the housekeeping for the trio. 



On February 28 old Mrs. Gosse died, at the age of eighty. 

 She had been bodily transplanted, with all her furniture, 

 pictures, and knick-knacks, to an apartment fitted up as 

 closely as possible to resemble her own old room in the Poole 

 house half a century before. She remained, until near the 

 last, in full possession of her intelligence, rugged, vehement, 

 slightly bewildered, filled with respect for her son, and recog- 

 nisant of his kindness, yet pathetically remote from all his 

 interests. While she was still able, on his arm, to creep 

 out a little in the sunshine, she visited his new tropical 

 fern-house, lately fitted up in the Sandhurst garden. The 

 little conservatory was a great success ; in the moist hot 

 air the transparent traceries of the delicate fronds formed 

 an exquisite feathery vault, on either side and above the 

 visitor. "I wonder," she said, after gazing round, "that 

 you care to keep a parcel of fern ; " and she turned away. 

 To her the fairy adiantums and aspleniums were no more 

 than specimens of that wide waste of " fern," of bracken, 

 which the open moors of Dorsetshire presented in such 



