We have said that most of this work—were it grave or gay, it mattered not—had to be got through in the midst of serious anxieties. Mrs Palmer’s health began to fail before they had been married long, and it soon became evident that her lungs were affected. It was necessary that she should leave Cambridge. In the spring of 1876, Wales was tried, with results which were so reassuring that it was decided to complete her cure (as it was then believed) by a winter in Paris. There, however, she got worse instead of better, and early in the following year her husband began to realize that she would die. In the autumn of 1877, they returned home to try Wales once more, and then, as a last resource, Bournemouth. There, in the summer of 1878, Mrs Palmer died. The expenses of so long an illness, added to journeyings to and fro, and the cost of keeping up two establishments (for he was obliged to continue his Cambridge lectures all the while), crippled his resources, and produced embarrassments from which he never became wholly free. His own health, too, never strong, gave way under his fatigues and worries, and he became only not quite so ill as his wife. Yet he never complained; never said a word about his troubles to any of his friends. Those who were most with him at this dreary time have recorded that he always met them with a smiling face, and went about his work as calmly as if he had been well and happy.
It was fortunate for him that he had a singularly joyous nature, which could never be saddened for long together. He was always surrounded by a pleasant atmosphere of cheerfulness, which not only did good to those about him, but had a salutary effect upon himself, enabling him to maintain his elasticity and vigour, even in the face of sorrow and ill-health. Most things have their comic side, if only men are not blind to it; and he could see the humorous aspect of the most melancholy or the most perilous situation. To the last he was full of life and fun. Though he no longer, as of old, wrote burlesques, he could draw clever caricatures of his friends and acquaintances; tell stories which convulsed his hearers with laughter; and sing comic songs—especially a certain Arab ditty, in which he turned himself into an Arab minstrel with really wonderful power of impersonation. Again, whatever he came across—especially in great cities like London or Paris—was full of interest for him. Without being a philanthropist, or, indeed, having a spark of humanitarian sentiment in his nature, he took a pleasure in investigating his fellow-creatures, talking to men and finding out all about them. He was endowed in the highest degree with the gift of sympathy; and this, while it made him the most loveable of friends, made him also a singularly acute investigator, and gave him a power of influencing others which was truly wonderful. He possessed, too, great manual dexterity, and took a pleasure in finding out how all those things were done which depend for their success upon sleight of hand; and in all such he became a proficient himself. He was a first-rate conjuror, and besides doing the tricks, ordinary and extraordinary, of professed conjurors, he took much satisfaction in reproducing the most startling phenomena of spiritualism, which he regarded as a debased form of conjuring—‘a swindle of the most palpable and clumsy kind.’ It was in such pursuits that he found the recreation which other men find in hard exercise. Of this he took very little. Even in his younger days he did not care for games, and his one attempt at cricket was nearly fatal to the wicket-keeper, whom he managed to hit on the head with his bat; but he was an expert gymnast, and loved boating and fishing in the Fens, to which he used to retire from time to time with one of his friends. It may be doubted whether he cared about the sport and the fresh air so much as the absolute repose; the old-world character of that curious corner of England; the total absence of convention. There he could dress as he pleased; and he took full advantage of his liberty. It is recorded that once, as he was coming home to College, he happened to meet the Master, Dr Bateson, who, casting his eye over the water-boots and flannels, stained with mud and weather, in which the learned Professor had encased himself, remarked, ‘This is Eastern costume, I suppose.’ ‘No, Master; Eastern Counties costume,’ was the reply.