published, and of his failure there. He applied for a position to teach
science in Toronto; being unsuccessful in this attempt, he applied
successively for various professorships in the United Kingdom, and in
this he was likewise unsuccessful. Some of his friends urged him to hold
out, but others thought the fight an unequal one, and advised him to
emigrate to Australia. He himself was tempted to practice medicine in
Sydney; but to give up his purpose seemed to him like cowardice. On the
other hand, to prolong the struggle indefinitely when he might quickly
earn a living in other ways seemed like selfishness and an injustice to
the woman to whom he had been for a long time engaged. Miss Heathorn,
however, upheld him in his determination to pursue science; and his
sister also, he writes, cheered him by her advice and encouragement to
persist in the struggle. Something of the man's heroic temper may be
gathered from a letter which he wrote to Miss Heathorn when his affairs
were darkest. "However painful our separation may be," he says, "the
spectacle of a man who had given up the cherished purpose of his life
. . . would, before long years were over our heads, be infinitely more
painful." He declares that he is hemmed in by all sorts of difficulties.
"Nevertheless the path has shown itself a fair one, neither more
difficult nor less so than most paths in life in which a man of energy
may hope to do much if he believes in himself, and is at peace within."
Thus relieved in mind, he makes his decision in spite of adverse fate.
"My course of life is taken, I will not leave London--I WILL make myself
a name and a position as well as an income by some kind of pursuit
connected with science which is the thing for which Nature has fitted me
if she has ever fitted any one for anything."

But suddenly the long wait, the faith in self, were justified, and the
turning point came. "There is always a Cape Horn in one's life that
one either weathers or wrecks one's self on," he writes to his sister.