Hurrell put to sea, again from Falmouth, this time without Newman or his father. ‘Blowing a full gale … and I to start to-morrow morning!’ And, by way of hygienic consolation: ‘A sailing vessel is as nearly the cleanest thing in the world as a steamer is the dirtiest.’ Mr. Keble, who may have chiefly influenced his decision to go to Barbados, would be intimately interested, for a dozen reasons, to hear of Hurrell’s welfare in a field where he himself might once have found his lifework. As long before as 1824, he had been offered the Archdeaconry of Barbados (worth £2000 a year), and declined his only ecclesiastical dignity, as he declined or accepted pretty much everything, for a pious domestic reason: his father was too infirm. To the Rev. JOHN KEBLE, Jan. 9, 1834. Barbados. ‘With hands bitten sore by mosquitoes, I set to, upon a sheet of paper which will witness many fresh bites before I get through it. The wretches are flitting about me on all sides, and every moment I am forced to put down my pen and hit at them. People soon cease to care for them: that is my only consolation. The weather here is most delicious, the thermometer averaging eighty-three degrees, and showers flying in all directions. When it rains here, they say: “What a fine day!”… The room I am in has seven windows and four doors, with a thorough draught every way; everything is contrived for getting up thorough draughts: long passages open at both ends, for the everlasting east wind to blow through, and windows on every side of a room where it is possible, or immense doors opposite them, where it is not. I suppose before the hurricane[163] this must have been a house fit for a resident gentleman of high pretensions; now it consists only of two rooms, and a number of sheds erected round them against the walls that remain standing…. The sum which was set aside by Government to repair the injury done here is not allowed to go to the repair of Churches, even though 24,000_l._ of it is still in hand, which they do not know how to dispose of, and seven Churches are in complete ruins….