Catch me going out of reach of letters again. I have been
horridly anxious. Nobody--children or any one else--can be
to me what you are. Ulysses preferred his old woman to
immortality, and this absence has led me to see that he was as
wise in that as in other things.

Quick and keen-edged as he was, I cannot recall his ever losing his
temper with any of us at home. Firm he was under his great tenderness
for children; those nearest him felt a certain awe before the
infallible force of his moral judgments; his arbitrament, though
rarely invoked, was instant and final. Going out into the world
afterwards, I think we did not fail to realize how different the
home atmosphere must be where self-control does not rule, and the
inevitable rubs of life find vent in irritable and ill-considered
words.

It was one of the penalties of his hard-driven existence that for the
first fifteen or twenty years of his married life he had scarcely any
time to devote to his children. The "lodger," as he used to describe
himself, who went out early and came back late, could sometimes
spare half-an-hour just before or just after dinner to draw wonderful
pictures for the little ones, or on a Sunday he would now and then
walk with the elder ones to Hampstead Heath or to the Zoo, where, as
a constant visitant to the prosector's laboratory, he was a well-known
figure, and admitted by the keepers to their arcana. But, while he
often told us stories of the sea and of animals, he did not talk
"shop" to us, as many people seemed to expect by their inquiries
whether we did not receive quite a scientific education from his
companionship.

At the same time, he was anything but a Bohemian. His inborn gaiety
and high spirits, his humour and love of adventure, found from the
first a balance in his love of science; and the rough experience
of his early days intensified by contrast the spiritual serenity
of united love. Lack of order, whether in mind or in outward
surroundings, was no recommendation to him; and so far as the
conventions represented in brief some valid results of social
experience, he observed them and upheld them. They are not always dry
husks out of which reason has evaporated. But where such were merely
unreasoned custom, he was ready to set aside his mere likes and
dislikes on good cause shown, and to follow reason as against the
simple prejudice of custom, even his own.

On the whole, he made his impression on his c