A BOOK FOR NATURE LOVERS. 
95 
During the next twelve years tours were made in Europe, Egypt, and Syria; 
plants were collected and stored in the glasshouses built for them at Hastings 
Lodge, and soon became familiar friends. One day Sir William Hooker gave 
Miss North a branch of the Amherstia 7whilis, with its great bunches of bright 
vermilion flowers sacred to Buddha, and from that time father and daughter often 
talked of visits to the tropics— visits, however, never to be accomplished by them 
together. In 1867 Mr. North’s health began to fail, and after an excursion to 
Gastein he returned to Hastings to die. 
In July, 1871, Miss North took the first of her long tours to Canada and the 
United States ; there her loving intimacy with plant life became confirmed. The 
sweet-scented Comptonia, so called after a bishop of London, was one of the first 
of the wayside plants with which she made acquaintance. Later, she was gathering 
and painting, if possible in sitti, the wild flowers in the neighbourhood of New 
York, the Indian turnip of the Americans (Arisama triphylla), the lady’s slipper 
{Cypripedium parviJloru7n), the cancer root (Apkyllo7t 7t7iiJlo7-H7)t), the brilliant 
Azalea 7iudiJlo7-a, the stagger bush {A7idro7ueda Maria77d), and other plants. 
Returning occasionally to social life, with which she was never much 
enamoured. Miss North met Longfellow, Agassiz, and other well-known persons. 
She found time to visit some of the North servants who had settled in America, 
and finally found her way to the White House, where President and Mrs. Grant, 
being under the impression that she was the daughter of Lord North the ex-Prime 
Minister, showed her marked attention. Armed with letters from Charles Kingsley 
and others. Miss North, chilled by the severe cold of the northern States, deter- 
mined on spending her Christmas Day in Jamaica, where she soon found a little 
home about a thousand feet above the sea. 
Revelling for a time in the glorious tangle of tropical vegetation, she painted 
the great Caladitu7i escule7itu7/i and other plants ; and under the guidance of the 
Governor, Sir J. P. Grant, she saw the gigantic bread-fruit, the mahogany trees, 
the bamboos fifty feet in height, the ebony and cotton trees ; ate sour sop and 
guava, and listened to a musician in the shape of a bird who “whistled twa 
notes scientifically describable as the diminished seventh of the key of F, E flat, 
and B natural alternately, always in perfect tune.” 
Returning to England on the i6th of June, our artist started again in August 
to continue her studies of tropical plants in Brazil. Always observant, however, 
she did not permit her mind to be entirely absorbed by the vegetation, magnificent 
as it was in its growth and variety of form and colour. At Rio she saw Bauget’s 
valuable collection of humming birds, and cried out with child-like delight 
w'hen at Morro Velho she discovered a nest of one of these fairy-like birds 
hanging by strands of spider-webs to bamboo leaves and maiden-hair ferns. 
At the height of 3,000 feet above the sea she found the Arauca7-ia In-asilieusis, 
which, beginning life as a perfect cone, then becomes barrel-shaped with a flat top, 
and ends as a giant stick supporting a leafy saucer. .A.fter visiting the once 
prosperous mining districts and the healthy Highlands of Brazil she returned to 
Rio, spending a pleasant hour with the versatile Emperor and Empress. The 
amount of painting which she got through during this expedition was enormous. 
Of the subsequent tours made to Teneriffe, California, Japan, Borneo, Java, 
Ceylon, and the native states of India, which she left in 1879, none afforded her 
more pleasure than that to Borneo, where the Rajah and beautiful Ranee of 
Sarawak gave her that freedom of life and sympathy with her tastes so dear to 
her. 
In California Miss North was a favourite in the neighbourhood of the “ Great 
Grisly ” as being “ one of the right sort, neither caring for bears nor yet for Injuns.” 
Japan was visited at a good time of the year for an artist fond of the gorgeous 
tints of decaying foliage, but too late for health, with the result that, after constant 
attacks of rheumatism terminating in rheumatic fever, she was compelled to beat 
a retreat to the warm air of Singapore. 
On her return to England Miss North hired a room in Conduit Street for the 
e.xhibition of her pictures, which gave rise to a suggestion in the Pall Mall Gazelle 
that they should ultimately find a home in Kew Gardens. An offer to present the 
collection to the nation was immediately made, and Sir Joseph Hooker and Mr. 
P'ergusson, the architect, gave their assistance in carrying out the plan. The 
design of the museum settled. Miss North, on the personal recommendation of 
Darwin, determined upon adding the flora of Australia to her collection. 
