34 
PROFESSOR OWEN 
CH. II. 
will ultimately be an honour to it as well.’ ‘ All 
your friends here,’ she continues, ‘ are much 
pleased, and say that you are a lucky young man 
to meet with an appointment of the kind while 
numbers of the profession hardly know which 
way to turn. It is evident to me that your good 
conduct, added to your abilities and industry, have 
gained you the notice of the Professors. Should 
you, my dear boy, be in want of money before 
your quarter becomes due, do not hesitate to 
say so.’ 
It was in September 1827 that Richard Owen 
first met Miss Clift. She was one day hanging 
in her mother’s room a pair of bell-pulls which 
she had made ; but in getting down from the 
step-ladder she overbalanced herself and had a 
bad fall, which completely stunned her. Her 
brother, William Home Clift, immediately called 
in Owen, as the nearest surgeon at hand, to attend 
to her injuries. When the young lady came to, the 
first person she saw was her father’s colleague. 
‘ I had once before seen him and spoken to him,’ 
she writes in her diary for 1827, ‘but I had not 
noticed him much, for it was on the occasion of 
his being called in during William’s illness, and 
we were all rather frightened at the time.’ Soon 
after there appear in her diary sundry little notes 
to this effect : — ‘ R. O. gave me a carved tortoise- 
shell comb,’ and ‘ R. O. gave me a volume of 
Cowper’s Poems.’ 
