could not find any post wherein to earn his bread and butter.  He stood for professorships at Toronto, at Sydney, at Aberdeen, Cork and King’s College, London.  The Admiralty, in March, 1854, even refused further leave for the 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, but alike in a largeness of soul and freedom from pettiness, which made their forty years of united life something out of the common.  She believed in him; in the darkest season of disappointment she bade him remember that a man should pursue those things for which he is most fitted, let them be what they will.  Her “noble and self-sacrificing” words brought him comfort, and banished “the spectre of a wasted life that had passed before him—­a vision of that servant who hid his talent in a napkin and buried it.”