CHAPTER I.
'In all his life he never engaged in a law suit. Reader, try if you can go so far and be so good a man.'
Thus concludes the epitaph of Doctor Unonius, upon a modest stone in the churchyard of Polpeor, in Cornwall, of which parish he was, during his life, the general friend, as his scientific reputation now abides its boast.
To those who knew him in life there is a gentle irony in the thought that while, during life, his scientific attainments earned him nothing but neglect, their recognition grows now proportionately as the man himself, his face and habit, the spruce black suit he wore, and the thousand small acts of kindness he did, fade out of memory. 'Your late eminent fellow-parishioner, now these forty years with God,'—so the Bishop of the Diocese spoke the other day before unveiling a stained-glass window to that memory in Polpeor Church. The Bishop, you see, spoke of eternal life in terms of time—a habit with us all. If anything could be more certain than that, in whatever bliss Doctor Unonius now inherits, forty years—or a thousand for that matter—count as one day, it is that throughout his life he detested stained-glass. Through this very window, indeed, now obscured ad majorem gloriam Dei et in memoriam Johannis Unonii medicinae doctoris, he loved—for it faced his pew—to watch during sermon-time the blue sky, the clouds, the rooks at their business in the churchyard elms. He has even recorded (in an essay on 'Visions' read before the Tregantick Literary and Scientific Society in the winter session of 1856) that once, awaking with a start in the middle of Parson Grylls's sermon, he distinctly saw suspended in these same elm-tops the image of an abnormally long pilot-fish (naucretes ductor) he had received from a fishing-boat overnight and left at home in his surgery mounted upon an apparatus of his own invention, ready to be sketched before dissection. Piscium et summa genus haesit ulmo . . . for twenty seconds, rubbing his eyes, he stared at the apparition as it very slowly faded.
It is on his researches in ichthyology, his list (no short one) of discoveries, his patient classification of British Fishes, that his fame rests. 'Why "British"?' the reader may ask. 'Have fishes, then, our nationalities?' The doctor liked to think so. He was a lover of his country, and for three years, while Napoleon threatened us with invasion, he had served as a second-lieutenant in that famous company, the East and West Looe Volunteer Artillery, better known as the Looe Die-hards. Now, in times of peace, with Britain supreme upon the seas, he boldly claimed for her every fish found off these shores. A sturgeon, even, might not visit our coastal waters, however casual the occasion, without receiving the compliment of citizenship for himself and his tribe. Yet Doctor Unonius patiently tracked these creatures in their most distant migrations—'motus et migrationes diligentissime indagavit,' says the mural tablet beneath the window. The three lights of the window represent (1) Jonah vomited by the Whale, (2) the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, and (3) St Peter, John Dory and the stater.
Polpeor, you must know, is a fishing-haven on the south coast of Cornwall, famous during the Napoleonic Wars for its privateering, and for its smuggling scarcely less notorious down to the middle of the last century. The doctor's parents, though of small estate, had earned by these and more legitimate arts enough money to set them dreaming of eminence for their only child, and sent him up to London to Guy's Hospital, where he studied surgery under the renowned Mr Astley Cooper. Having qualified himself in this and in medicine, he returned to his native home, which he never again left—save now and then for a holiday—until the day of his death.
Assiduous in visiting the sick, he found the real happiness of his life (one might almost say its real business) in his scientific and literary recreations. The range and diversity of these may be gathered from a list of his published writings: 'The Efficacy of Digitalis Applied to Scrofula,' 'On the Carpenter Bee (Apis Centuncularis),' 'Domestic Usage and Economy in the Reign of Elizabeth,' 'A Reply to a Query on Singular Fishes,' 'The Fabulous Foundation of the Popedom' (abridged from Bernard), 'Migratory Birds of the West of England,' 'God's Arrow against Atheism and Irreligion,' 'A Dissertation on the Mermaid,' 'Observations on the Natural History of the Chameleon,' 'Ditto on the Jewish and Christian Sabbath Days,' 'Ditto on Cider-making and the Cultivation of Apple Trees,' 'Contributions to a Classification of British Crustacea,' 'On Man as the Image of the Deity,' 'Daulias Advena; or, the Migrations of the Swallow Tribe.' We select these from the output of one decade only. A little later the activity grows less miscellaneous, and he is drifting upon his magnum opus, as the titles indicate, 'Some Particulars of Rare Fishes found in Cornwall,' 'An Account of a Fish nearly allied to Hemiranphus,' 'On the Occurrence of the Crustacean Scyllurus Arctus.'
He would announce these strange visitors—sepia biserialis, for an instance—with no less eagerness than a journalist hails the advent of a foreign potentate. He had invented, as we have said, an apparatus on which he mounted them, with a jet of salt water that played over their scales and kept fresh, as he maintained, the delicate hues he copied from his water-colour box; with what success let anybody judge who has studied the four great volumes wherein these drawings survive, reproduced by lithography, and published by subscription.
Immersed in these studies, Doctor Unonius found no leisure to think of matrimony; and his friends and neighbours often took occasion to deplore it, for he was an extremely personable man, fresh-coloured and hale, of clean and regular habits, and, moreover, kind-hearted to a fault. All Polpeor agreed that he needed a wife to look after him, to protect him from being robbed; and Polpeor (to do it justice) did not say this without knowledge. The good man could never be persuaded that Polpeor folk—his folk—were capable of doing him a wrong; but certain it is that learnedly as he wrote 'On the Cultivation of Apple Trees,' the fruit of his carefully tended standards and espaliers seldom arrived at his own table. They burgeoned, they bloomed; the blossom 'pitched,' as we say in the West; the fruit swelled, ripened, and then—
Garden shows were rarities in those days: but Tregarrick (Polpeor's nearest market town) boasted a Horticultural Society and an annual Exhibition. Whether from indolence or modesty Doctor Unonius never competed, but he seldom missed to visit the show and to con the exhibits. The date was then, and is to this day, the Feast of St Matthew, which falls on the twenty-first of September: and one year, on the morrow of St Matthew's Feast, the doctor, gazing pensively over his orchard gate at a noble tree of fruit, remarked to his friend and next-door neighbour, Captain Minards, late of the merchant service—