utiful destiny to remain to the last hour the
same absolute and romantic lover, who had shown to his new bride the
flag-draped vessels in the Mersey. No fate is altogether easy; but
trials are our touchstone, trials overcome our reward; and it was given
to Fleeming to conquer. It was given to him to live for another, not as
a task, but till the end as an enchanting pleasure. "People may write
novels," he wrote in 1869, "and other people may write poems, but not a
man or woman among them can write to say how happy a man may be who is
desperately in love with his wife after ten years of marriage." And
again in 1885, after more than twenty-six years of marriage, and within
but five weeks of his death: "Your first letter from Bournemouth," he
wrote, "gives me heavenly pleasure--for which I thank Heaven and you
too--who are my heaven on earth." The mind hesitates whether to say that
such a man has been more good or more fortunate.

Any woman (it is the defect of her sex) comes sooner to the stable mind
of maturity than any man; and Jenkin was to the end of a most deliberate
growth. In the next chapter, when I come to deal with his telegraphic
voyages and give some taste of his correspondence, the reader will still
find him at twenty-five an arrant schoolboy. His wife besides was more
thoroughly educated than he. In many ways she was able to teach him, and
he proud to be taught; in many ways she outshone him, and he delighted
to be outshone. All these superiorities, and others that, after the
manner of lovers, he no doubt forged for himself, added as time went on
to the humility of his original love. Only once, in all I know of his
career, did he show a touch of smallness. He could not learn to sing
correctly; his wife told him so and desisted from her lessons; and the
mortification was so sharply felt that for years he could not be induced
to go to a concert, instanced himself as a typical man without an ear,
and never sang again. I tell it; for the fact that this stood singular
in his behaviour, and really amazed all who knew him, is the happiest
way I can imagine to commend the tenor of his simplicity; and because it
illustrates his feeling for his wife. Others were always welcome to
laugh at him; if it amused them, or if it amused him, he would proceed
undisturbed with his occupation, his vanity invulnerable. With his wife
it was different: his wife had laughed at his singing; and for twenty
years the fibre ached. Nothing,