with and partly understood the easy French of some volumes of Voltaire's works. Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh, friend of the Prince Regent, from whom the house had descended to his sister-in-law, my mother's Miss Featherstonehaugh, had been a liberal thinker. Moreover in the attic at Up Park the writer unearthed a Gregorian telescope in its box, put it together with some difficulty, and spent some chilly but wonderful nights looking at the moon, at the phases of Venus, and at Jupiter's satellites.
From Midhurst he won a studentship at what is now the Royal College of Science, South Kensington. He did three years of good work there; his biological professor was Huxley, and a little later, without much difficulty, he was able to take the London Bachelor of Science degree with first-class honours in Zoology. Thereafter came some school teaching and the direction of "cramming" classes for the science examinations in the London medical course. But insufficient food and exercise during his student days, when he had to live in London upon his weekly allowance of a guinea, had left him with an attenuated physique; a football accident close upon his twenty-first birthday crushed and destroyed one kidney, and his body did not readjust itself satisfactorily to the consequences of these misadventures until he was in his middle thirties. He had some years of not so much ill health as unstable health. Each London winter made a sustained attempt to kill him. He was almost driven by these circumstances to live out of London and to indulge his desire to write for a living.
While at the Royal College of Science he had
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