Her
sympathy and encouragement did much for him; her belief in the future
of "her boy" was redoubled upon his first public success when, at the
age of seventeen, he won the second prize, the silver medal of the
Apothecaries' Company, in a competitive examination in botany. "For a
young hand," he tells us, "I worked really hard from eight or nine in
the morning until twelve at night, besides a long, hot summer's walk
over to Chelsea, two or three times a week, to hear Lindley. A great
part of the time--_i.e._, June and July--I worked till sunrise. The
result was a sort of ophthalmia, which kept me from reading at night
for months afterwards."
The lively and amusing description of the examination and its sequel
is given in full in the _Life_; suffice it to say that when four
o'clock came and only two competitors were left writing hard, and not
half through the paper, they were allowed to go on by general consent.
By eight o'clock the seventeen-year-old came to an end; the older man
went on until nine. This was John Ellerton Stocks, afterwards M.D. and
a distinguished traveller and botanist in India. To him fell the first
prize; the boy, to his own astonishment and the wild delight of his
sister, won the second.
In October, 1812, a couple of months after this success, both he and
his brother James entered Charing Cross Hospital as free scholars.
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