MY RELATIVES AND ANCESTORS 15 



and a little architecture. When I went to the Amazon, he 

 took a small dairy-farm at too high a rent, and not making this 

 pay, in 1849 he emigrated to California at the height of the first 

 rush for gold, joined several mining camps, and was moder- 

 ately successful. About five years later he came home, mar- 

 ried Miss Webster, and returning to California, settled for 

 some years at Columbia, a small mining town in Tuolumne 

 County. He afterwards removed to Stockton, where he prac- 

 tised as surveyor and water engineer till his death in 1895. 



My younger brother, Herbert, was first placed with a trunk 

 maker in Regent Street, but not liking this business, after- 

 wards came to Neath and entered the pattern-shops of the 

 Neath Ironworks. After his brother John went to California 

 he came out to me at Para, and after a year spent on the 

 Amazon as far as Barra on the Rio Negro, he returned to Para 

 on his way home, where he caught yellow fever, and died in a 

 few days at the early age of twenty-two. He was the only 

 member of our family who had a considerable gift of poesy, 

 and was probably more fitted for a literary career than for any 

 mechanical or professional occupation. 



It will thus be seen that we were all of us very much thrown 

 on our own resources to make our way in life ; and as we all, 

 I think, inherited from my father a certain amount of consti- 

 tutional inactivity or laziness, the necessity for work that our 

 circumstances entailed was certainly beneficial in developing 

 whatever powers were latent in us ; and this is what I implied 

 when I remarked that our father's loss of his property was per- 

 haps a blessing in disguise. 



Of the five daughters, the first-born died when five months 

 old; the next, Eliza, died of consumption at Hertford, aged 

 twenty-two. Two others, Mary Anne and Emma, died at Usk 

 at the ages of eight and six respectively; while Frances mar- 

 ried Mr. Thomas Sims, a photographer, and died in London, 

 aged eighty-one. 



On the whole, both the Wallaces and the Greenells seem to 

 have been rather long-lived families when they reached man- 

 hood or womanhood. The five ancestral Wallaces of whom I 

 have records had an average age of seventy years, while the 



