These feelings of youthful vanity, however, became sobered down by an ardent and lasting attachment to a young lady of the name of Clarke; and, after a union of forty years, he was able, with truth, to say, "I fixed my hopes where I have never been disappointed." As his father very prudently objected to his marrying before he was twenty-one, this engagement of three years was not fulfilled till the 3rd of May (just three days after his coming of age). In consequence of this event, his father supplied him with a capital sufficient to commence business as a general merchant; and he turned his whole attention to the occupation thus marked out for him. For the first few years he seems to have been tolerably successful; but the casualties of ships lost at sea, and failures in speculations, the details of which it would be tedious to relate, together with the death of both his beloved parents, within a year of each other, made him still more disgusted with a pursuit so little in accordance with his natural taste and inclination, and by which he foresaw his income was likely to be diminished, rather than increased. He therefore determined to retire into the country, and went to reside at Sustead, a most sequestered spot, not many miles distant from Aylsham (where his sister resided in the house which had been left to them by their father). Here passed five years of uninterrupted domestic happiness. The improvement of his garden, as may be expected, was his favourite occupation; the beauties of Nature were his delight; and the investigation of her wonders his amusement. Not an insect or flower passed unnoticed by his inquiring mind; and in these pursuits he was encouraged by the frequent visits of his friend and schoolfellow, Mr. (afterwards Sir) James Edward Smith, who, when in after-life he became President of the Linn�an Society, thus writes to him:�"Not all the black devils, nor even blue ones, which last, thank God, are known to me nomine tantum, can restrain me from thanking you for the last paragraph in your letter, which recalls youth and Sustead, and my first botanizing days, when I hoarded up a hazel-twig gathered in your grounds. There I first began to emerge from the still pool of life, where fate had dropped me. I hope to remind you of some things you may have forgotten, if we meet in town this spring."
