unfortunate young man had not only been "sent out," but had undergone
more than one colonial conviction.

[His brief school career was happily cut short by the break up of the
Ealing establishment. On the death of Dr. Nicholas, his sons attempted
to carry on the school; but the numbers declined rapidly, and George
Huxley, about 1835, returned to his native town of Coventry, where he
obtained the modest post of manager of the Coventry savings bank, while
his daughters eked out the slender family resources by keeping school.

In the meantime the boy Tom, as he was usually called, got little or no
regular instruction. But he had an inquiring mind, and a singularly
early turn for metaphysical speculation. He read everything he could lay
hands on in his father's library. Not satisfied with the ordinary length
of the day, he used, when a boy of twelve, to light his candle before
dawn, pin a blanket round his shoulders, and sit up in bed to read
Hutton's "Geology." He discussed all manner of questions with his
parents and friends, for his quick and eager mind made it possible for
him to have friendships with people considerably older than himself.
Among these may especially be noted his medical brother-in-law, Dr.
Cooke of Coventry, who had married his sister Ellen in 1839, and through
whom he early became interested in human anatomy; and George Anderson
May, at that time in business at Hinckley (a small weaving centre some
dozen miles distant from Coventry), whom his friends who knew him
afterwards in the home which he made for himself on the farm at Elford,
near Tamworth, will remember for his genial spirit and native love of
letters. There was a real friendship between the two. The boy of fifteen
notes down with pleasure his visits to the man of six-and-twenty, with
whom he could talk freely of the books he read, and the ideas he
gathered about philosophy.