But though the original attack was successfully thrown off, the lung trouble had affected the heart; and in his weakened state, renal mischief ensued.  Yet he held out splendidly, never giving in, save for one hour of utter prostration, all through this weary length of sickness.  His first recovery strengthened him in expecting to get well from the second attack.  And on June 10 he writes brightly enough to Sir J.D.  Hooker:—­]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, June 10, 1895.

My dear Old Friend,

It was cheering to get your letter and to hear that you had got through winter and diphtheria without scathe.

I can’t say very much for myself yet, but I am carried down to a tent in the garden every day, and live in the fresh air all I can.  The thing that keeps me back is an irritability of the stomach tending to the rejection of all solid food.  However, I think I am slowly getting the better of it—­thanks to my constitutional toughness and careful nursing and dieting.

What has Spencer been trampling on the “Pour le merite” for, when he accepted the Lyncei?  I was just writing to congratulate him when, by good luck, I saw he had refused!

The beastly nausea which comes on when I try to do anything warns me to stop.

With our love to you both,

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

[The last time I saw him was on a visit to Eastbourne from June 22-24.  I was astonished to find how well he looked in spite of all; thin, indeed, but browned with the endless sunshine of the 1895 summer as he sat every day in the verandah.  His voice was still fairly strong; he was delighted to see us about him, and was cheerful, even merry at times.  As the nurse said, she could not expect him to recover, but he did not look like a dying man.  When I asked him how he was, he said, “A mere carcass, which has to be tended by other people.”  But to the last he looked forward to recovery.  One day he told the nurse that the doctors must be wrong about the renal mischief, for if they were right, he ought already to be in a state of coma.  This was precisely what they found most astonishing in his case; it seemed as if the mind, the strong nervous organisation, were triumphing over the shattered body.  Herein lay one of the chief hopes of ultimate recovery.

As late as June 26 he wrote, with shaky handwriting but indomitable spirit, to relieve his old friend from the anxiety he must feel from the newspaper bulletins.]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, June 26, 1895.

My dear Hooker,

The pessimistic reports of my condition which have got into the papers may be giving you unnecessary alarm for the condition of your old comrade.  So I send a line to tell you the exact state of affairs.

There is kidney mischief going on—­and it is accompanied by very distressing attacks of nausea and vomiting, which sometimes last for hours and make life a burden.