When I was seven years old I had the misfortune to be laid up with scarlet fever, and then his gift of drawing was a great solace to me.  The solitary days—­for I was the first victim in the family—­were very long, and I looked forward with intense interest to one half-hour after dinner, when he would come up and draw scenes from the history of a remarkable bull-terrier and his family that went to the seaside, in a most human and child-delighting manner.  I have seldom suffered a greater disappointment than when, one evening, I fell asleep just before this fairy half-hour, and lost it out of my life.

In those days he often used to take the three eldest of us out for a walk on Sunday afternoons, sometimes to the Zoological Gardens, more often to the lanes and fields between St. John’s Wood and Hampstead or West End.  For then the flood of bricks and mortar ceased on the Finchley Road just beyond the Swiss Cottage, and the West End Lane, winding solitary between its high hedges and rural ditches, was quite like a country road in holiday time, and was sometimes gladdened in June with real dog-roses, although the church and a few houses had already begun to encroach on the open fields at the end of the Abbey Road.

My father often used to delight us with sea stories and tales of animals, and occasionally with geological sketches suggested by the gravels of Hampstead Heath.  But regular “shop” he would not talk to us, contrary to the expectation of people who have often asked me whether we did not receive quite a scientific training from his companionship.

At the Christmas dinner he invariably delighted the children by carving wonderful beasts, generally pigs, out of orange peel.  When the marriage of his eldest daughter had taken her away from this important function, she was sent the best specimen as a reminder.]

4 Marlborough Place, December 25, 1878.

Dearest Jess,

We have just finished the mid-day Christmas dinner, at which function you were badly wanted.  The inflammation of the pudding was highly successful—­in fact Vesuvian not to say Aetnaic—­and I have never yet attained so high a pitch in piggygenesis as on this occasion.

The specimen I enclose, wrapped in a golden cerecloth, and with the remains of his last dinner in the proper region, will prove to you the heights to which the creative power of the true artist may soar.  I call it a “Piggurne, or a Harmony in Orange and White.”

Preserve it, my dear child, as evidence of the paternal genius, when those light and fugitive productions which are buried in the philosophical transactions and elsewhere are forgotten.

My best wishes to Fred and you, and may you succeed better than I do in keeping warm.

Ever your loving father,

T.H.  Huxley.

[Later on, however, the younger children who kept up the home at Marlborough Place after the elder ones had married or gone out into the world, enjoyed more opportunities of his ever-mellowing companionship.  Strongly as he upheld the conventions when these represented some valid results of social experience, he was always ready to set aside his mere likes and dislikes on good cause shown; to follow reason as against the mere prejudice of custom, even his own.