In February of the year 1866, a great trouble and anxiety fell upon Newman while he and his wife were staying at Hastings. For nine or ten days she seemed to be dying. "We got her through the acute crisis.... I resigned her a full month ago, and have since not dared to hope that she can do anything but linger. Nevertheless her life is less distressing and more worth having than it was. She moves from her bed into an arm-chair; sits at table for dinner.... She talks cheerfully, and can enjoy seeing her sisters. When I look at her I fancy she is pretty well;... yet I feel that she might be carried off very suddenly. Indeed, this was her mother's case, who had the very same combination of disease, and retained much muscular strength to the last. We had two physicians at Hastings, and here she is under Dr. Garth Wilkinson. I have no complaint against any of the physicians: they seem to me all to have done all they could; but nothing that anyone has done has been of any use. It was by nursing, not by medicine, that she was saved through critical days and nights. The physician said she could not live forty-eight hours, and so we believed: and at her request I sent him away.... I have written so many letters that I forget to whom I have written: and it was indeed a tumultuous existence at Hastings. I have now a good night nurse and cannot say that I want anything; but a great shadow overspreads me." The Doctor had evidently miscalculated Mrs. Newman's strength and recuperative power, however, for in June of the same year:-- "I am happy to say that she" (Mrs. Newman) "now looks very like herself, though feebler and liable (I fear) to relapse. But she is not only in comparative health, but gives a hope of acquiring more soundness in the next three months. I give up this house" (10 Circus Road, N.W.) "in a very few days, and have taken a house in Clifton--1 Dover Place--but it will not be ready for us until 1st August." Nearly three months later, he writes:-- "I am at last in my new home, which is very pretty, very pleasant, with delightful prospect, and _perhaps_ may suit me well; but I have sad trouble with a drunken house owner, who kept me twenty-three days out later than his contract,... and has given me roof and pipes either out of repair or insufficient, rat holes very troublesome,... cisterns and taps all in unsatisfactory state. Last night, for the third time in ten days, I have been inundated through two floors." But he adds more hopefully than the case seems to warrant," If I can get these matters right my house is very promising. ... After a few weeks here my wife's strength has increased notably, by no other doctor than a donkey chaise, and she now seems just what she was last summer....