publication of the scientific work to do which he had been sent out.
He took the bull by the horns, and, rather than return to the hopeless
routine of a naval surgeon, let the Admiralty fulfil their threat to
deprive him of his appointment, and the slender pay which was his
only certain support. His scientific friends besought him to hold on;
something must come in his way, and a brilliant career was before him;
but was he justified, he asked himself again and again, in pursuing
the glorious phantom, so miserably paid at the best, instead of taking
up some business career, perhaps in Australia, and ending the cruel
delay which bore so hardly upon the woman he loved? Yet would not this
be a desertion of his manifest duty, his intellectual duty to himself
and to Science? He knew full well that there was only one course which
could bring him either hope or peace, and yet, between the two calls
upon him, he never knew which course he would ultimately follow.

[Illustration: From a Daguerrotype made in 1846]

For her there was no such mental development. Assuredly she kept up
her literary pursuits, her study of German, in which they had found
common ground of interest, for she had spent two years at school in
Germany; but she was cribbed and cabined by the ups and downs of early
colonial life, and the fluctuating ventures upon which her father
delighted to embark; there was, naturally, no possibility of her
moving in the stimulating intellectual society which was his, and
hope deferred wore upon her as the laurels of scientific success were
consistently followed by failure in all solid prospects. Yet neither
possible misunderstandings, nor actual disappointments, had power to
shake the foundations of their mutual trust, and the inspiration of
the ideal which each built on the other's so different character; the
one more compact of fire, the other more of noble patience, different,