Then would follow another spell of work till near one o’clock; the weather might tempt him out again before lunch; but afterwards he was certain to be out for an hour or two from half-past two.  However hard it blew, and Eastbourne is seldom still, the tiled walk along the sea-wall always offered the possibility of a constitutional.  But the high expanse of the Downs was his favourite walk.  The air of Beachy Head, 560 feet up, was an unfailing tonic.  In the summer he used to keep a look-out for the little flowers of the short, close turf of the chalk which could remind him of his Alpine favourites, in particular the curious phyteuma; and later on, in the folds of the hills where he had marked them, the English Gentians.

After his walk, a cup of tea was followed by more reading or writing till seven; after dinner another pipe, and then he would return to my mother in the drawing-room, and settle down in his particular armchair, with some tough volume of history or theology to read, every now and again scoring a passage for future reference, or jotting a brief note on the margin.  At ten he would migrate to the study for a final smoke before going to bed.

Such was his routine, broken by occasional visits to town on business, for he was still Dean of the Royal College of Science and a trustee of the British Museum.  Old friends came occasionally to stay for a few days, and tea-time would often bring one or two of the small circle of friends whom he had made in Eastbourne.  These also he occasionally visited, but he scarcely ever dined out.  The talking was too tiring.

The change to Eastbourne cut away a whole series of interests, but it imported a new and very strong one into my father’s life.  His garden was not only a convenient ambulatory, but, with its growing flowers and trees, became a novel and intense pleasure, until he began] “to think with Candide that ‘Cultivons notre jardin’ comprises the whole duty of man.”

[It was strange that this interest should have come suddenly at the end of his life.  Though he had won the prize in Lindley’s botanical class, he had never been a field botanist till he was attracted by the Swiss gentians.  As has been said before, his love of nature had never run to collecting either plants or animals.  Mere “spider-hunters and hay-naturalists,” as a German friend called them, he was inclined to regard as the camp-followers of science.  It was the engineering side of nature, the unity of plan of animal construction, worked out in infinitely varying detail, which engrossed him.  Walking once with Hooker in the Rhone valley, where the grass was alive with red and green grasshoppers, he said,] “I would give anything to be as interested in them as you are.”

[But this feeling, unknown to him before, broke out in his gentian work.  He told Hooker, “I can’t express the delight I have in them.”  It continued undiminished when once he settled in the new house and laid out a garden.  His especial love was for the rockery of Alpines, many of which came from Sir J. Hooker.