Everything is going on very well here.  The weather is delightful, and under these circumstances my lodgings here with John Ball for a companion turns out to be a most excellent arrangement.  Ca va sans dire, though, by the way, that is a bull induced by the locality.  I am not going on any of the excursions on Sunday.  I am going to have a quiet day here when everybody will suppose that I have accepted everybody else’s invitation to be somewhere else.  The Ulster Hall, in which the addresses are delivered, seems to me to be a terrible room to speak in, and I mean to nurse my energies all Monday.  I sent you a cutting from one of the papers containing an account of me that will amuse you.  The writer is evidently disappointed that I am not a turbulent savage.

August 25.

...My work is over and I start for Kingstown, where I mean to sleep to-night, in an hour.  I have just sent you a full and excellent report of my lecture. ["On Animals as Automata”:  see above.] I am glad to say it was a complete success.  I never was in better voice in my life, and I spoke for an hour and a half without notes, the people listening as still as mice.  There has been a great row about Tyndall’s address, and I had some reason to expect that I should have to meet a frantically warlike audience.  But it was quite otherwise, and though I spoke my mind with very great plainness, I never had a warmer reception.  And I am not without hope that I have done something to allay the storm, though, as you may be sure, I did not sacrifice plain speaking to that end...I have been most creditably quiet here, and have gone to no dinners or breakfasts or other such fandangoes except those I accepted before leaving home.  Sunday I spent quietly here, thinking over my lecture and putting my peroration, which required a good deal of care, into shape.  I wandered out into the fields in the afternoon, and sat a long time thinking of all that had happened since I was here a young beginner, two and twenty, and...you were largely in my thoughts, which were full of blessings and tender memories.

I had a good night’s work last night.  I dined with the President of the College, and then gave my lecture.  After that I smoked a bit with Foster till eleven o’clock, and then I went to the “Northern Whig” office to see that the report of my lecture was all right.  It is the best paper here, and the Editor had begged me to see to the report, and I was anxious myself that I should be rightly represented.  So I sat there till a quarter past one having the report read and correcting it when necessary.  Then I came home and got to bed about two.  I have just been to the section and read my paper there to a large audience who cannot have understood ten words of it, but who looked highly edified, and now I have done.  Our lodging has turned out admirably, and Ball’s company has been very pleasant.  So that the fiasco of our arrangements was all for the best.

[I take the account of this last-mentioned paper in Section D from the report in “Nature":—­