If the lease of a piece of ground whereon I am going to build mine house come to you, will you see if it’s all right.

Yours wilfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[This house, Number 4 Marlborough Place, stands on the north side of that quiet street, close to its junction with Abbey Road.  It is next door to the Presbyterian Church, on the other side of which again is a Jewish synagogue.  The irregular front of the house, with the original cottage, white-painted and deep eaved, joined by a big porch to the new uncompromising square face of yellow brick, distinguished only by its extremely large windows, was screened from the road by a high oak paling, and a well-grown row of young lime-trees.  Taken as a whole, it was not without character, and certainly was unlike most London houses.  It was built for comfort, not beauty; designed, within stringent limits as to cost, to give each member of the family room to get away by himself or herself if so disposed.  Moreover, the gain in space made it more possible to see something of friends or put up a guest, than in the small and crowded house in Abbey Place.

A small garden lay in front of the house; a considerably larger garden behind, wherein the chief ornament was then a large apple-tree, that never failed to spread a cloud of blossom for my father’s birthday, the 4th of May.

Over the way, too, for many years we were faced by a long garden full of blossoming pear-trees in which thrushes and blackbirds sang and nested, belonging to a desolate house in the Abbey Road, which was tenanted by a solitary old man, supposed to be a male prototype of Miss Havisham in “Great Expectations.”

The move was accompanied by a unique and unpleasant experience.  A knavish fellow, living in a cottage close to the foot of the garden, sought to blackmail the new comer, under threat of legal proceedings, alleging that a catchment well for surface drainage had made his basement damp.  Unfortunately for his case, it could be shown that the pipes had not yet been connected with the well, and when he carried out his threat, he gained nothing from his suit in Chancery and his subsequent appeal, except some stinging remarks from Vice-Chancellor Malins.]

I am afraid the brute is impecunious [wrote my father after the first suit failed], and that I shall get nothing out of him.  So I shall have had three months’ worry, and be fined 100 pounds sterling or so for being wholly and absolutely in the right.

[Happily the man turned out to have enough means to pay the bulk of the costs; but that was no compensation for the mental worry and consequent ill-health entailed from November to June.

The only amusing point in the whole affair was when the plaintiff’s solicitors had the face to file an affidavit before the Vice-Chancellor himself in answer to his strictures upon the case, “about as regular a proceeding,” reports Mr. Burton, “as for a middy to reply upon the Post Captain on his own quarter-deck.”