38 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, hi 



funeral urn supported on a pedestal, and as dilapidated as the 

 rest of the affair. These dilapidations, as usual, are the work 

 of English visitors, relic-hunters, who are as shameless here 

 as elsewhere. I was exceedingly pleased on the whole with my 

 excursion, and when I returned I made a drawing of the place, 

 which I will send some day or other. 



Since this I have made, in company with our purser and a 

 passenger, Mr. King, a regular pedestrian trip to see some very 

 beautiful falls up the country. 



Leaving Mauritius on May 17, they prolonged their 

 voyage to Sydney by being requisitioned to- take more 

 specie to Hobart Town, so that Sydney was not reached 

 until July 16, eight months since they had had news of 

 home. 



The three months spent in this first visit to Sydney 

 proved to be one of the most vital periods in the young 

 surgeon's career. From boyhood up, vaguely conscious of 

 unrest, of great powers within him working to find expres- 

 sion, he had yet been to a certain extent driven in upon him- 

 self. Hgj iad been so mewhat isolated from those of his own 

 age by his eagerness for problems about which they cared 

 nothing ; and the tendency to solitude, the habit of outward 

 reserve imposed upon an unusually warm nature, were 

 intensified by the fact that he grew up in surroundings not 

 wholly congenial. One member alone of his family felt 

 with him that complete and vivid sympathy which is so 

 necessary to the full development of such a nature. When 

 he was fourteen this sister married and left home, but the 

 bond between them was not broken. In some ways it was 

 strengthened by the lad's love for her children ; by his grief, 

 scarcely less than her own, at the death of her eldest little 

 girl. Moreover they were brought into close companionship 

 for a considerable time when, after his dismal period of 

 apprenticeship at Rotherhithe — to which he could never 

 look back without a shudder — he came to work under her 

 husband. She had encouraged him in his studies ; had 

 urged him to work for the Botanical prize at Sydenham 

 College; had brightened his life with her sympathy, and 

 believed firmly in the brilliant future which awaited him — a 



