Sometimes it would happen that a scene or object would recall an incident in his tropical wanderings and he would tell us of the sights he had seen. At the time he was greatly interested in botany, in which he was encouraged by our mother, who was an ardent lover of flowers; and to the end of his life he exhibited almost boyish delight when he discovered a rare plant. Many walks and excursions were taken for the purpose of seeing some uncommon plant growing in its natural habitat. When he had found the object of his search we were all called to see it. During his walks and holidays he made constant use of the one-inch Ordnance Maps, which he obtained for each district he visited, planning out our excursions on the map before starting. He had a gift for finding the most beautiful walks by means of it.
In 1878 we moved to Croydon, where we lived about four years. It was at this time that he hoped to get the post of Superintendent of Epping Forest. We still remember all the delights we children were promised if we went to live there. We had a day's excursion to see the Forest, he with [pg 107] his map finding out the roads and stopping every now and then to admire a fresh view or to explain what he would do if the opportunity were given him. It was a very hot day, and we became so thirsty that when we reached a stream, to our great joy and delight he took out of his pocket, not the old leather drinking-cup he usually carried, but a long piece of black indiarubber tubing. We can see him now, quite as pleased as we were with this brilliant idea, letting it down into the stream and then offering us a drink! No water ever tasted so nice! Our mother used to be a little anxious as to the quality of the water, but he always put aside such objections by saying running water was quite safe, and somehow we never came to any harm through it. The same happy luck attended our cuts and scratches; he always put "stamp-paper" on them, calling it plaster, and we knew of no other till years later. He used the same thing for his own cuts, etc., to the end of his life, with no ill effects.
In 1881 we moved again, this time to Godalming, where he had built a small house which be called "Nutwood Cottage." After Croydon this was a very welcome change and we all enjoyed the lovely country round. The garden as usual was the chief hobby, and Mr. J.W. Sharpe, our old friend and neighbour in those days, has written his reminiscences of this time which give a very good picture of our father. They are as follows:
About thirty-five years ago Dr. Wallace built a house upon a plot of ground adjoining that upon which our house stood. I was at that time an assistant master at Charterhouse School; and Dr. Wallace became acquainted with a few of the masters besides myself. With two or three of them he had regular weekly games of chess; for he was then and for long afterwards very fond of that game; and, I understand, possessed considerable skill at it. A [pg 108] considerable portion of his spare time was spent in his garden, in the management of which Mrs. Wallace, who had much knowledge and experience of gardening, very cordially assisted him. Here his characteristic energy and restlessness were conspicuously displayed. He was always designing some new feature, some alteration in a flower-bed, some special environment for a new plant; and always he was confident that the new schemes would be found to have all the perfections which the old ones lacked. From all parts of the world botanists and collectors sent him, from time to time, rare or newly discovered plants, bulbs, roots or seeds, which he, with the help of Mrs. Wallace's practical skill, would try to acclimatise, and to persuade to grow somewhere or other in his garden or conservatory. Nothing disturbed his cheerful confidence in the future, and nothing made him happier than some plan for reforming the house, the garden, the kitchen-boiler, or the universe. And, truth to say, he displayed great ingenuity in all these enterprises of reformation. Although they were never in effect what they were expected to be by their ingenious author, they were often sufficiently successful; but, successful or not, he was always confident that the next would turn out to be all that he expected of it. With the same confidence he made up his mind upon many a disputable subject; but, be it said, never without a laborious examination of the necessary data, and the acquisition of much knowledge. In argument, of which intellectual exercise he was very fond, he was a formidable antagonist. His power of handling masses of details and facts, of showing their inner meanings and the principles underlying them, and of making them intelligible, was very great; and very few men of his time had it in equal measure.
But the most striking feature in his conversation was his masterly application of general principles: these he handled with extraordinary skill. In any subject with which he was familiar, he would solve, or suggest a plausible solution of, difficulty after difficulty by immediate reference to fundamental principles. This would give to his conclusions an appearance of inevitableness which usually [pg 109] overbore his adversary, and, even if it did not convince him, left him without any effective reply. This, too, had a good deal to do, I am disposed to conjecture, with another very noticeable characteristic of his which often came out in conversation, and that was his apparently unfailing confidence in the goodness of human nature. No man nor woman but he took to be in the main honest and truthful, and no amount of disappointment—not even losses of money and property incurred through this faith in others' virtues—had the effect of altering this mental habit of his.
His intellectual interests were very widely extended, and he once confessed to me that they were agreeably stimulated by novelty and opposition. An uphill fight in an unpopular cause, for preference a thoroughly unpopular one, or any argument in favour of a generally despised thesis, had charms for him that he could not resist. In his later years, especially, the prospect of writing a new book, great or small, upon any one of his favourite subjects always acted upon him like a tonic, as much so as did the project of building a new house and laying out a new garden. And in all this his sunny optimism and his unfailing confidence in his own powers went far towards securing him success.—J.W.S.
"Land Nationalisation" (1882), "Bad Times" (1885), and "Darwinism" (1889) were written at Godalming, also the series of lectures which he gave in America in 1886-7 and at various towns in the British Isles. He also continued to have examination papers[44] to correct each year—and a very strenuous time that was. Our mother used to assist him in this work, and also with the indexes of his books.
We now began to make nature collections, in which he took the keenest interest, many holidays and excursions being arranged to further these engrossing pursuits. One or two incidents occurred at "Nutwood" which have left clear impressions upon our minds. One day one of us [pg 110] brought home a beetle, to the great horror of the servant. Passing at the moment, he picked it up, saying, "Why, it is quite a harmless little creature!" and to demonstrate its inoffensiveness he placed it on the tip of his nose, whereupon it immediately bit him and even drew blood, much to our amusment and his own astonishment. On another occasion he was sitting with a book on the lawn under the oak tree when suddenly a large creature alighted upon his shoulder. Looking round, he saw a fine specimen of the ring-tailed lemur, of whose existence in the neighbourhood he had no knowledge, though it belonged to some neighbours about a quarter of a mile away. It seemed appropriate that the animal should have selected for its attentions the one person in the district who would not be alarmed at the sudden appearance of a strange animal upon his shoulder. Needless to say, it was quite friendly.
A year or so before we left Godalming he enlarged the house and altered the garden. But his health not having been very good, causing him a good deal of trouble with his eyes, and having more or less exhausted the possibilities of the garden, he decided to leave Godalming and find a new house in a milder climate. So in 1889 he finally fixed upon a small house at Parkstone in Dorset.
Planning and constructing houses, gardens, walls, paths, rockeries, etc., were great hobbies of his, and he often spent hours making scale drawings of some new house or of alterations to an existing one, and scheming out the details of construction. At other times he would devise schemes for new rockeries or waterworks, and he would always talk them over with us and tell us of some splendid new idea he had hit upon. As Mr. Sharpe has noted, he was always very optimistic, and if a scheme did not come up to his expectations he was not discouraged but always declared he could do it much better [pg 111] next time and overcome the defects. He was generally in better health and happier when some constructional work was in hand. He built three houses, "The Dell" at Grays, "Nutwood Cottage" at Godalming, and the "Old Orchard" at Broadstone. The last he actually built himself, employing the men and buying all the materials, with the assistance of a young clerk of works; but though the enterprise was a source of great pleasure, it was a constant worry. He also designed and built a concrete garden wall, with which he was very pleased, though it cost considerably more than he anticipated. He had not been at Parkstone long before he set about the planning of "alterations" with his usual enthusiasm. We were both away from home at this time, and consequently had many letters from him, of which one is given as a specimen. His various interests are nearly always referred to in these letters, and in not a few of them his high spirits show themselves in bursts of exuberance which were very characteristic whenever a new scheme was afoot. The springs of eternal youth were for ever bubbling up afresh, so that to us he never grew old. One of us remembers how, when he must have been about 80, someone said, "What a wonderful old man your father is!" This was quite a shock, for to us he was not old. The letter referred to above is the following: