Instead of himself talking to excess, he liked to draw his visitors out, to get at their interests and their point of view, not in any intrusive fashion, but with instinctive sympathy, and with his natural modest sense that their affairs were more important than his own. He clearly had in a high degree the exquisite art of listening intelligently, and of asking questions which would bring out all that was best and most profitable in the person with whom he happened to be talking. This well appears in Charles Kingsley’s account of his first interview with him: ‘I was deeply moved at meeting for the first time Darwin. I trembled before him like a boy, and longed to tell him all I felt for him, but dare not, lest he should think me a flatterer extravagant. But the modesty and simplicity of his genius was charming. Instead of teaching, he only wanted to learn, instead of talking, to listen, till I found him asking me to write papers which he could as yet hardly write himself—ignorant in his grand simplicity of my ignorance and of his own wisdom.’[242] The conversation was not by any means always serious. It does not appear that Darwin had any great enjoyment of humorous literature. Nor was he inclined to witty flings or brilliant repartee. His mind worked too slowly for a rapid-fire exchange of this sort. It was only occasionally that he hit out at a promising interlocutor, as when he remarked to Lady Derby, who had been describing her remarkable peculiarities of vision, ‘Ah, Lady Derby, how I should like to dissect you.’[243] Above all, he had no taste for the satirical or bitter, and it was only under extreme provocation that he could write to Huxley: ‘God bless you!—get well, be idle, and always reverence a bishop.’[244] But he was full of genial, kindly fun, and was ready to see the laughable side of little incidents and even great. He laughed heartily and frequently and with an infectious gayety and buoyancy. He liked merry and humorous talk, with plenty of anecdote and sparkle, and he was ready to chaff and joke his friends and to take the same sort of thing himself. He was even willing to find a comic side in the sacred subject of natural selection and to turn his own deepest interests into matter for smiles when the occasion was suitable. Thus he writes to Lubbock, of his son: ‘See what it is to be well trained. Horace said to me yesterday, “If every one would kill adders they would come to sting less.” I answered, “Of course they would, for there would be fewer.” He replied indignantly: “I did not mean that; but the timid adders which run away would be saved, and in time they would never sting at all.” Natural selection of cowards!’[245]