I met J. Tyndall at Ramsay's last night, and I think he is greatly
inclined to have the house. I gave him your message and found that a
sneaking kindness for the old house actuated him a good deal in wishing
to take it. It is not a bad fellow, and we won't do him much on the
fixtures.

[Eventually Tyndall and his friend Hirst established themselves there.

This spring Professor Henslow, Mrs. Hooker's father, a botanist of the
first rank, and a man extraordinarily beloved by all who came in contact
with him, was seized with a mortal illness, and lingered on without hope
of recovery through almost the whole of April. Huxley writes:--]

Jermyn Street, April 4, 1861.

My dear Hooker,

I am very much grieved and shocked by your letter. The evening before
last I heard from Busk that your father-in-law had been ill, and that
you had been to see him, and I meant to have written to you yesterday to
inquire, but it was driven out of my head by people coming here. And
then I had a sort of unreasonable notion that I should see you at the
Linnean Council to-day and hear that all was right again. God knows, I
feel for you and your poor wife. Knowing what a great rift the loss of a
mere undeveloped child will leave in one's life, I can faintly picture
to myself the great and irreparable vacuity in a family circle caused by
the vanishing out of it of such a man as Henslow, with great
acquirements, and that great calm catholic judgment and sense which
always seemed to me more prominent in him than in any man I ever knew.