Nothing can bind me more closely to your children than I am already, but if the christening be not all over you must let me be godfather; and though I fear I am too much of a heretic to promise to bring him up a good son of the church—­yet should ever the position which you prophesy, and of which I have an “Ahnung” (though I don’t tell that to anybody but Nettie), be mine, he shall (if you will trust him to me) be cared for as few sons are.  As things stand, I am talking half nonsense, but I mean it—­and you know of old, for good and for evil, my tenacity of purpose.

Now, as to my own affairs—­I am not married.  Prudently, at any rate, but whether wisely or foolishly I am not quite sure yet, Nettie and I resolved to have nothing to do with matrimony for the present.  In truth, though our marriage was my great wish on many accounts, yet I feared to bring upon her the consequences that might have occurred had anything happened to me within the next few years.  We had a sad parting enough, and as is usually the case with me, time, instead of alleviating, renders more disagreeable our separation.  I have a woman’s element in me.  I hate the incessant struggle and toil to cut one another’s throat among us men, and I long to be able to meet with some one in whom I can place implicit confidence, whose judgment I can respect, and yet who will not laugh at my most foolish weaknesses, and in whose love I can forget all care.  All these conditions I have fulfilled in Nettie.  With a strong natural intelligence, and knowledge enough to understand and sympathise with my aims, with firmness of a man, when necessary, she combines the gentleness of a very woman and the honest simplicity of a child, and then she loves me well, as well as I love her, and you know I love but few—­in the real meaning of the word, perhaps, but two—­she and you.  And now she is away, and you are away.  The worst of it is I have no ambition, except as means to an end, and that end is the possession of a sufficient income to marry upon.  I assure you I would not give two straws for all the honours and titles in the world.  A worker I must always be—­it is my nature—­but if I had 400 pounds sterling a year I would never let my name appear to anything I did or shall ever do.  It would be glorious to be a voice working in secret and free from all those personal motives that have actuated the best.  But, unfortunately, one is not a “vox et praeterea nihil,” but with a considerable corporality attached which requires feeding, and so while my inner man is continually indulging in these anchorite reflections, the outer is sedulously elbowing and pushing as if he dreamed of nothing but gold medals and professors’ caps.

I am getting on very well—­better I fear than I deserve.  One of my papers was published in 1849 in the “Philosophical Transactions,” another in the “Zoological Transactions,” and some more may be published in the “Linnean” if I like—­but I think I shall not like.  Then I have worked pretty hard, and brought home a considerable amount of drawings and notes about new or rare animals, all particularly nasty slimy things, and they will most likely be published as a separate work by the Royal Society.