“Yes, perhaps,” he said.  “But who was he?”

“I don’t know yet,” I returned.  “I can only see that his name was Sibthorpe.”

“Sibthorpe!” he exclaimed excitedly.  “Why, this is the very memorial I’ve been looking for all over the abbey and had pretty well given up all hopes of finding it.”  With that he went to it and began studying the inscription, which was in Latin.  John Sibthorpe, I found, was a distinguished botanist, author of the Flora Graeca, who died over a century ago.

I asked him why he was interested in Sibthorpe’s memorial.

“Well, you see, I’m a great botanist myself,” he explained, “and have been familiar with his name and work all my life.  Of course,” he added, “I don’t mean I’m great in the sense that Sibthorpe was.  I’m only a little local botanist, quite unknown outside my own circle; I only mean that I’m a great lover of botany.”

I left him there, and had the curiosity to look up the great man’s life, and found some very curious things in it.  He was a son of Humphrey Sibthorpe, also a great botanist, who succeeded the still greater Dillenius as Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford, a post which he held for thirty-six years, and during that time he delivered one lecture, which was a failure.  John, if he did not suck in botany with his mother’s milk, took it quite early from his father, and on leaving the University went abroad to continue his studies.  Eventually he went to Greece, inflamed with the ambition to identify all the plants mentioned by Dioscorides.  Then he set about writing his Flora Graeca; but he had a rough time of it travelling about in that rude land, and falling ill he had to leave his work undone.  When nearing his end he came to Bath, like so many other afflicted ones, only to die, and he was very properly buried in the abbey.  In his will he left an estate the proceeds of which were to be devoted to the completion of his work, which was to be in ten folio volumes, with one hundred plates in each.  This was done and the work finished forty-four years after his death, when thirty copies were issued to the patient subscribers at two hundred and forty guineas a copy.  But the whole cost of the work was set down at 30,000 pounds!  A costlier work it would be hard to find; I wonder how many of us have seen it?

But I must go back to my subject.  I was not in Bath just to die and lie there, like poor Sibthorpe, with all those strange bedfellows of his, nor was I in search of a vacant space the size of my hand on the walls to bespeak it for my own memorial.  On the contrary, I was there, as we have seen, to knock five years off my age.  And it was very pleasant, as I have said, so long as I confined my attention to Bath, the stone-built town of old memories and associations—­so long as I was satisfied to loiter in the streets and wide green places and in the Pump Room and the abbey.  The bitter came in only when, going from places to faces, I began