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 next time and overcome the defects.
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