After he had retired to Eastbourne, his grandchildren reaped the benefit of his greater leisure.  In his age his love of children brimmed over with undiminished force, unimpeded by circumstances.  He would make endless fun with them, until one little mite, on her first visit, with whom her grandfather was trying to ingratiate himself with a vast deal of nonsense, exclaimed:  “Well, you are the curioustest old man I ever seen.”

Another, somewhat older, developed a great liking for astronomy under her grandfather’s tuition.  One day a visitor, entering unexpectedly, was astonished to find the pair of them kneeling on the floor in the hall before a large sheet of paper, on which the professor was drawing a diagram of the solar system on a large scale, with a little pellet and a large ball to represent earth and sun, while the child was listening with the closest attention to an account of the planets and their movements, which he knew so well how to make simple and precise without ever being dull.

Children seemed to have a natural confidence in the expression of mingled power and sympathy which, especially in his later years, irradiated his “square, wise, swarthy face” ("There never was a face, I do believe” (wrote Sir Walter Besant of the portrait by John Collier), “wiser, more kindly, more beautiful for wisdom and the kindliness of it, than this of Huxley.”—­The “Queen”, November 16, 1895.), and proclaimed to all the sublimation of a broad native humanity tried by adversity and struggle in the pursuit of noble ends.  It was the confidence that an appeal would not be rejected, whether for help in distress, or for the satisfaction of the child’s natural desire for knowledge.

Spirit and determination in children always delighted him.  His grandson Julian, a curly-haired rogue, alternately cherub and pickle, was a source of great amusement and interest to him.  The boy must have been about four years old when my father one day came in from the garden, where he had been diligently watering his favourite plants with a big hose, and said:  “I like that chap!  I like the way he looks you straight in the face and disobeys you.  I told him not to go on the wet grass again.  He just looked up boldly, straight at me, as much as to say, ‘What do you mean by ordering me about?’ and deliberately walked on to the grass.”

The disobedient youth who so charmed his grandfather’s heart was the prototype of Sandy in Mrs. Humphry Ward’s “David Grieve”.  When the book came out my father wrote to the author:  “We are very proud of Julian’s apotheosis.  He is a most delightful imp, and the way in which he used to defy me on occasion, when he was here, was quite refreshing.  The strength of his conviction that people who interfere with his freedom are certainly foolish, probably wicked, is quite Gladstonian.”