exceedingly pleased on the whole with my excursion, and when I returned I made a drawing of the place, which I will send some day or other. Since this I have made, in company with our purser and a passenger, Mr. King, a regular pedestrian trip to see some very beautiful falls up the country. [Leaving Mauritius on May 17, they prolonged their voyage to Sydney by being requisitioned to take more specie to Hobart Town, so that Sydney was not reached until July 16, eight months since they had had news of home. The three months spent in this first visit to Sydney proved to be one of the most vital periods in the young surgeon's career. From boyhood up, vaguely conscious of unrest, of great powers within him working to find expression, he had yet been to a certain extent driven in upon himself. He had been somewhat isolated from those of his own age by his eagerness for problems about which they cared nothing; and the tendency to solitude, the habit of outward reserve imposed upon an unusually warm nature, were intensified by the fact that he grew up in surroundings not wholly congenial. One member alone of his family felt with him that complete and vivid sympathy which is so necessary to the full development of such a nature. When he was fourteen this sister married and left home, but the bond between them was not broken. In some ways it was strengthened by the lad's love for her children; by his grief, scarcely less than her own, at the death of her eldest little girl. Moreover they were brought into close companionship for a considerable time when, after his dismal period of apprenticeship at Rotherhithe--to which he could never look back without a shudder--he came to work under her husband. She had encouraged him in his studies; had urged him to work for the Botanical prize at Sydenham College; had brightened his life with her sympathy, and believed firmly in the brilliant future which awaited him--a belief which for her sake, if for nothing else, he was eager to justify by his best exertions.