The other day I submitted it to William Macleay (the celebrated propounder of the Quinary system), who has a beautiful place near Sydney, and, I hear, “werry much approves what I have done.”  All this goes to the comforting side of the question, and gives me hope of being able to follow out my favourite pursuits in course of time, without hindrance to what is now the main object of my life.  I tell Netty to look to being a “Frau Professorin” one of these odd days, and she has faith, as I believe would have if I told her I was going to be Prime Minister.

We go to the northward again about the 23rd of this month [April], and shall be away for ten or twelve months surveying in Torres Straits.  I believe we are to refit in Port Essington, and that will be the only place approaching to civilisation that we shall see for the whole of that time; and after July or August next, when a provision ship is to come up to us, we shall not even get letters.  I hope and trust I shall hear from you before then.  Do not suppose that my new ties have made me forgetful of old ones.  On the other hand, these are if anything strengthened.  Does not my dearest Nettie love you as I do! and do I not often wish that you could see and love and esteem her as I know you would.  We often talk about you, and I tell her stories of old times.

[Another letter, a year later, gives his mother the answers to a string of questions which, mother-like, she had asked him, thirsting for exact and minute information about her future daughter-in-law:—­]

Sydney, February 1, 1849.

[After describing how he had just come back from a nine months’ cruise)—­First and foremost, my dear mother, I must thank you for your very kind letter of September 1848.  I read the greater part of it to Nettie, who was as much pleased as I with your kindly wishes towards both of us.  Now I suppose I must do my best to answer your questions.  First, as to age, Nettie is about three months younger than myself—­that is the difference in our years, but she is in fact as much younger than her years as I am older than mine.  Next, as to complexion she is exceedingly fair, with the Saxon yellow hair and blue eyes.  Then as to face, I really don’t know whether she is pretty or not.  I have never been able to decide the matter in my own mind.  Sometimes I think she is, and sometimes I wonder how the idea ever came into my head.  Whether or not, her personal appearance has nothing whatever to do with the hold she has upon my mind, for I have seen hundreds of prettier women.  But I never met with so sweet a temper, so self-sacrificing and affectionate a disposition, or so pure and womanly a mind, and from the perfectly intimate footing on which I stand with her family I have plenty of opportunities of judging.  As I tell her, the only great folly I am aware of her being guilty of was the leaving her happiness in the hands of a man like myself, struggling upwards and certain of nothing.