V. PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON 99

A second result was his collection of a very perfect series of Valparaiso humming birds, out of which he spared, for a present to my mother, as many as filled with purple and golden flutter two glass cases as large as Mr. Gould’s at the British Museum, which became resplendent decorations of the drawing-room at Herne Hill,-were to me, as I grew older, conclusive standards of plume texture and colour,-and are now placed in the best lighted recess of the parish school at Coniston.

113. The third result was more important still. Dr. Grant had been presented by the Spanish masters of mines with characteristic and rich specimens of the most beautiful veinstones of Copiapo. It was a mighty fact for me, at the height of my child’s interest in minerals, to see our own parlour table loaded with foliated silver and arborescent gold. Not only the man of science, but the latent miser in me, was developed largely in an hour or two! In the pieces which Dr. Grant gave me, I counted my treasure grain by grain;¹ and recall to-day, in acute sympathy with it, the indignation I felt at seeing no instantly reverential change in cousin Charles’s countenance, when I informed him that the film on the surface of an unpresuming specimen, amounting in quantity to about the sixteenth part of a sixpence, was “native silver”!

Soon after his return from this prosperous voyage, Dr. Grant settled himself in a respectable house half-way down Richmond Hill, where gradually he obtained practice and accepted position among the gentry of that town and its parkly neighbourhood. And every now and then, in the summer mornings, or the gaily frost-white winter ones, we used, papa and mamma, and Mary and I, to drive over Clapham and Wandsworth Commons to a breakfast picnic with Dr. Grant at the “Star and Garter.” Breakfasts

other, “whence the origin of the name I have applied to the genus,ciazw decusso gnaqos maxilla.” “Dr. Grant,” it is stated, “who presented this interesting specimen to the Society, was surgeon on board H.M.S. Forte, when she returned to England in the summer of 1830 from the South American station.”]

¹ [Compare Eagle’s Nest, § 83 (Vol. XXII. p. 183).]

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