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JAMES BACKHOUSE. 57
population seemed to rest. Out of veiy scanty resources he had built
a chapel and a school-house, and now he wished to establish a reading-
room for the grown-up young men. We had an introduction to this
minister, and called upon him the evening after our arrival, and talked
about the village and its condition, and took his advice (and very
good advice we found it) as to the best botanizing ground in the
neighbourhood. After expressing his sympathy with him at parting,
my companion said, " I hope thou wilt write and tell me how the
reading-room goes on." That was all I knew at the time ; but after a
few years this minister died and his biography was published, and I
read in his address at the opening of the reading-room the sequel of
our conversation,—how that out of £118 which the room had cost,
Mr. Backhouse had gathered and sent £45.
He kept his activity of body and mind scarcely impaired till past 70 ;
but, after this, attacks of intermittent angina pectoris obliged him to
restrict his jouueys, and incapacitated him from mountain-climbing.
The last time we called upon him, about a year ago, though we found
him very feeble in body, he was able to go with us round his garden,
and was as interested and enthusiastic as of old in showing us his acquisitions,
and was reading the Duke of Argyll's ' Eeign of Law
with warm approbation, and writing out for a journal the notes which
it suggested. Since, just after his return from the Cape, he at our first
meeting laid his hand upon the head of the writer of this notice, then
a little boy at school, with " ^lind and get up to the top of the class
the finest apples always grow high up on the tree ;" and a few years later
encouraged him in botany at a time when he had no one else to encou-
rage him, and gave him the first set of Highland plants which he pos-
sessed,—we have had the privilege of a continuous acquaintance with,
him ; have stayed at his house, and received him as a guest at our
own ; have been lost with him in mountain mists, and stranded with
him in the parlours of little country inns in pouring rain ; have had
his sympathy in times of rejoicing and misfortune ; have heard him
rivet the attention of crowded meetings in London by his words of
earnest patriarchal authority, and rivet no less the attention of a room-
ful of rough uneducated Yorkshire men and women by his pithy anec-
dotes, with teetotalism as the moral of the story, and his shrewd
straightforward common-sense. And we bear our testimonv, now that
he is gone, to his thoroughness and his consistency in all these so varied
VOL. VII. [FEBRUARY 1, 1868.] F
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