Note 142 — Chapter XVII

He entered the Royal Navy, and survived his father only a year and eleven months. He was a Lieutenant, at the time of his death from a sharp attack of bronchitis; being then on board the P. and O. steamer "Malta," invalided from his ship the Topaze, and on his way home. He was buried at sea on the 2nd of May, 1872. Poor fellow! He was the smallest in size of all the children, in his manhood reaching only to a little over five feet; and throughout his childhood was never called by any other name than the "Ocean Spectre," from a strange little weird yet most attractive look in his large wondering eyes, very happily caught in a sketch in oils by the good Frank Stone, done at Bonchurch in September 1849 and remaining in his aunt's possession. "Stone has painted," Dickens then wrote to me, "the Ocean Spectre, and made a very pretty little picture of him." It was a strange chance that led his father to invent this playful name for one whom the ocean did indeed take to itself at last.