The general public saw little or nothing of either of these gentlemen.
Sometimes at places like the Royal Institution and the Society of Arts
it did in a sort of way see Mr. Bensington, or at least his blushing
baldness and something of his collar and coat, and hear fragments of a
lecture or paper that he imagined himself to be reading audibly; and
once I remember--one midday in the vanished past--when the British
Association was at Dover, coming on Section C or D, or some such letter,
which had taken up its quarters in a public-house, and following two,
serious-looking ladies with paper parcels, out of mere curiosity,
through a door labelled "Billiards" and "Pool" into a scandalous
darkness, broken only by a magic-lantern circle of Redwood's tracings.

I watched the lantern slides come and go, and listened to a voice (I
forget what it was saying) which I believe was the voice of Professor
Redwood, and there was a sizzling from the lantern and another sound
that kept me there, still out of curiosity, until the lights were
unexpectedly turned up. And then I perceived that this sound was the
sound of the munching of buns and sandwiches and things that the
assembled British Associates had come there to eat under cover of the
magic-lantern darkness.

And Redwood I remember went on talking all the time the lights were up
and dabbing at the place where his diagram ought to have been visible on
the screen--and so it was again so soon as the darkness was restored. I
remember him then as a most ordinary, slightly nervous-looking dark man,
with an air of being preoccupied with something else, and doing what he
was doing just then under an unaccountable sense of duty.

I heard Bensington also once--in the old days--at an educational
conference in Bloomsbury. Like most eminent chemists and botanists, Mr.