You will have a son some day yourself, I suppose, and, if you do, I can wish you no greater satisfaction than to be able to say that he has reached manhood without having given a serious anxiety, and that you can look forward with entire confidence to his playing the man in the battle of life.  I have tried to make you feel your responsibilities and act independently as early as possible; but, once for all, remember that I am not only your father but your nearest friend, ready to help you in all things reasonable, and perhaps in a few unreasonable.

After he had retired from his professorial work and settled down at Eastbourne, his grandchildren reaped the advantage of his leisure.  His natural love for children had scope for expression, and children themselves had an instinctive confidence in the power and sympathy that irradiated his face and gave his square, rugged features the beauty of wisdom and kindliness.  He could captivate them alike by lively fun and excellent nonsense, and by lucid explanations of the wonders of the world about which children love to hear.  He fired one small granddaughter with a love of astronomy, and one day a visitor, entering unexpectedly, was startled to find the pair of them kneeling on the floor of the entrance hall before a large sheet of paper, on which the professor was drawing a diagram of the solar system, with a little pellet and a big ball to represent earth and sun, while the child was listening with rapt attention to an account of the planets and their movements, which he knew so well how to make simple and precise without ever being dull.

One of the most charming unions of the playful and serious was his letter to the small boy, still under five, who was reading The Water Babies, wherein his grandfather’s name is genially made fun of among the authorities on Water Babies and Water Beasts of every description.  Moreover, there is a picture by Linley Sambourne, showing Huxley and Owen examining a bottled Water Baby under big magnifying glasses.  Now, as the child greatly desired more light on the reality of Water Babies, here was an authority to consult.  And, as he had already learned to write, he indited a letter of inquiry, first anxiously asking his mother if he would receive in reply a “proper letter” that he could read for himself, or a “wrong letter” that must be read to him.  The hint bore fruit, and to his carefully pencilled epistle: 

    Have you seen a Water Baby?  Did you put it in a bottle?  Did it
    wonder if it could get out?  Can I see it some day?

came a reply from his grandfather, neatly printed, letter by letter, very unlike the orderly confusion with which his pen usually rushed across the paper—­to the great perplexity, often, of his foreign correspondents and sometimes of correspondents nearer home:—­