As the year draws near its close he describes his position as one of “overwrought excitement” when his mind dwells upon the approaching examination, which gives way to “a state of despondency” as a single thought of his sad home passes before him. Either this depression or the natural humility of his character makes him now “expect to take a fair second-rate degree”; when within a fortnight of the examination his mind becomes calmer, and he is enabled to make a good forecast of the result. “I have good reason to hope,” he writes, “for a place upon which I shall look back with pleasure and gratification all my life. . . . My own desire is to get into the first six wranglers, and if I accomplish that I shall be delighted. . . . I am not sanguine, but neither am I anxious. I desire to leave it altogether in the full assurance that I shall get the place which is best for me, whatever that place may be.” Surely the influence of the “text for life” is visible here! And those who knew him in later years will remember that this was his leading characteristic to the close of his life, making every preparation, using every endeavour, and then leaving the issue tranquilly in the hands of Him who “careth for you.” Christmas Day was spent with his Uncle and Aunt Gurney, and two or three days at the beginning of the New Year given to his home, to turn away his mind entirely from mathematics for the last day or two before his examination. Then two letters appear in the carefully preserved bundle, one to his mother at Hampstead:— “I have not time to write much, but I have the unspeakable pleasure of telling you that I am 5th Wrangler and Robert Pryor 4th. I cannot say how thankful and happy I feel about it.” Written hastily, and in suppressed excitement, the date at the head of the letter—“December 17th, 1833”—is wrong both in the month and year (as the postmark testifies). The same day he writes more fully to his father in London; to this letter there is no date at all. Never surely in all his life did he make either of these mistakes again! (The postmark on this is the same as on the former letter, viz. January 17th, 1834.)