1862-64 ‘GENERAL’ TOM THUMB 155 
Monday evening. I was then the guest of an 
old Bartholomew’s friend. On Tuesday I left 
Birmingham to meet by appointment the Council 
of the Philosophical Society there at the museum. 
Inspected that, and the beautiful church ; then to 
the Castle. Much interested in all I saw. 1 o- 
day I see Kenilworth, to-morrow home.’ 
On December i Owen had two strange 
visitors at the British Museum — ‘ General ’ and 
Mrs. Tom Thumb. They called upon him in 
great state, and were shown up to the Professor’s 
room by the hall-porter. In going over the 
Museum, Mrs. Tom Thumb, it seems, hung her 
head, as if not liking to be looked at by the people 
there, but the ‘ General ’ was quite self-possessed, 
and looked at the different things in an observant 
tvay, beguiling the time with conversation about 
his visit to the Prince of Wales. 
‘ I had a pleasant gossip,’ says Owen to his 
sister Eliza (December 6, 1864), ‘ with the Dean 
of Westminster last evening, who sat next to me 
at the “ Literary Club,” about the weddings at 
Alderley, and the Holy Land, and the extra verse 
In the Cambridge copy of the Greek MS. of the 
hi- T., and about the Davenport Yankee Brothers 
and conjurors in general, and the geology of 
^Westminster. My other neighbour, the Under- 
secretary of State for India, confessed to having 
paid his guinea and been banged by the guitars, &c.® 
” At one of the spiritualistic stances of the Davenport Brothers. 
