In the summer of 1849, an English clergyman travelling by rail happened to share a carriage with a middle-aged woman who had beside her a luxuriantly blossoming houseplant. Both he and the other passengers made polite comments on the size and beauty of the plant and on the unusual care with which the woman guarded it. In response, she revealed that it had been a parting gift from her husband, an officer on Sir John Franklin's missing Arctic expedition. Overcome with despair at the thought that she would never see him again, she had left her ‘now desolate home’ and was going to live with her sister. The vigorous growth and rich blossoms of the plant showed that she had lavished ‘the full force of her womanly love’ upon it; indeed, the clergyman concluded that it ‘was to her the only living symbol and memento of him whom she mourned as for ever lost to her’. Yet, the woman recounted, ‘as it daily flourished and … brightly flowered from season to season, it seemed to revive and renew her perishing hopes’. The ‘tones of suppressed emotion’ in which she spoke, and her ‘air of sadness, tinged with a gleam of wifely pride’, immediately won the sympathy of her fellow passengers. Looking back on the incident two years later, the clergyman recalled their intense interest in the woman's story as his first indication of just how deep national feeling on the subject of Franklin's lost expedition ran.