The last year has been eventful for me.  There is always a Cape Horn in one’s life that one either weathers or wrecks one’s self on.  Thank God I think I may say I have weathered mine—­not without a good deal of damage to spars and rigging though, for it blew deuced hard on the other side.

At the commencement of this year my affairs came to a crisis.  The Government, notwithstanding all the representations which were made to them, would neither give nor refuse the grant for the publication of my work, and by way of cutting short all further discussion the Admiralty called upon me to serve.  A correspondence ensued, in which, as commonly happens in these cases, they got the worst of it in logic and words, and I in reality and “tin.”  They answered my syllogism by the irrelevant and absurd threat of stopping my pay if I did not serve at once.  Here was a pretty business!  However, it was no use turning back when so much had been sacrificed for one’s end, so I put their Lordships’ letter up on my mantelpiece and betook myself to scribbling for my bread.  They, on the other hand, removed my name from the List.  So there was an interregnum when I was no longer in Her Majesty’s service.  I had already joined the “Westminster Review,” and had inured myself to the labour of translation—­and I could get any amount of scientific work I wanted—­so there was a living, though a scanty one, and amazingly hard work for it.  My pen is not a very facile one, and what I write costs me a good deal of trouble.

In the spring of this year, however, a door opened.  My poor lost friend Professor Forbes—­whose steady attachment and aid had always been of the utmost service to me—­was called to fill the chair of Natural History in Edinburgh at a moment’s notice.  It is a very valuable appointment, and he was obliged to fill it at once.  Of course he left a number of vacancies behind, among them one at the Government School of Mines in Jermyn Street, where he lectured on Natural History.  I was called upon to take up his lectures where he left off, in the same sudden way, and the upshot of it all was that I became permanently attached—­with 200 pounds sterling a year pay.  In other ways I can make a couple of hundred a year more even now, and I hope by-and-by to do better.  In fact, a married man, as I hope soon to be, cannot live at all in the position which I ought to occupy under less than six hundred a year.  If I keep my health, however, I have every hope of being able to do this—­but, as the jockeys say, the pace is severe.  Nettie is coming over in the spring, and if I have any luck at all, I mean to have paid off my debts and to be married by this time next year. ([He writes on July 21, 1851:—­]"I commenced life upon nothing at all, and I had to borrow in the ordinary way from an agent for the necessary expenses of my outfit.  I sent home a great deal of money, but notwithstanding, from the beautiful way they have of accumulating interest