I] 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 emigrated to California at 

 the height of the first rush for gold, joined several mining 

 camps, and was moderately successful. About five years 

 later he came home, married 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 practised 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 

 constitutional 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 perhaps 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 

 married 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 

 manhood or womanhood. The five ancestral Wallaces of 



