254 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. CHAP. VI. 



every week, besides teaching a practical class and instructing 

 private pupils. This excess of labour has compelled me to sit 

 up every night till two o'clock, and rise at seven ; and so tired 

 am I when I come home at four o'clock, that I often fall asleep 

 on the sofa while dinner is being served. 



" The worst is over now, and I shall have more leisure for 

 some time to come ; but till my class had been fairly begun, I 

 had not one moment of repose. I have now some thirty-one 

 pupils, a most unexpected and cheering number, and I am, of 

 course, most anxious to keep up the good opinion they entertain 

 of me. Many of them are older and wiser than myself. I have 

 no fewer than four Cambridge men fresh from their college, be- 

 sides prize mathematicians from our own University, and other 

 shrewd fellows who have sharp eyes to blunders, and could 

 quickly detect them in my present subject of Heat, which they 

 have all studied more or less before. I have, however, given 

 supplementary Saturday lectures, that I might bring before 

 them new doctrines never taught here, at least in chemistry 

 classes. 



" In my week-day ordinary discourses, for the sake of my 

 youngest pupils, I have made everything as simple as possible. 

 One of my pupils, however, came up one day to inform me I was 

 making things too simple (!); as it were, wasting my students' 

 time, ' gilding refined gold.' I said to him at the time, that if 

 he would wait till the examinations began, he would see whether 

 or not I had simplified too much, determined to give him if he 

 came, a knock-down question. However, last week we were on 

 a subject difficult enough in its simplest form ; and the crest- 

 fallen genius announced to me mournfully that he could not fol- 

 low one word of what I had been saying. I laughed, and told 

 him never to mind. He is settled. 



" I shall only add further about myself, that I have just got 

 out of bed, having been sleeping there after the excessive labour 

 of last week. It was knocking me up, and my wound, after 

 healing, opened afresh and began to inflame : to prevent the 

 serious results that might follow I rested yesterday and all to- 

 day. And I shall have much more leisure in the week to 

 come." 



