ite unconscious of the flight of time.
"I do love getting really _buried_ in a book," he would say; "it's the
best of tests." Sometimes he wrote, sometimes he composed music, sometimes
he would have his table covered with bits of paper full of unintelligible
designs and patterns. He did not mind being questioned, but he would not
satisfy one's curiosity. "It's only some nonsense of mine," he would say.
He did not write many letters, and they were generally short. At times he
would be very busy on his farm, at times occupied in the village, at times
he took long walks alone; very occasionally he went away for a day or two.
He was both uncommunicative and communicative. He would often talk with the
utmost frankness and abandon about his private affairs; but, on the other
hand, I always had the sense of much that was hidden in his life. And I
have no doubt that he spent much time in prayer and meditation. He seldom
spoke of this, but it played a large part in his life. He gave the
impression of great ease, cheerfulness, and tranquillity, attained by some
deliberate resolve, because he was both restless and sensitive, took
sorrows and troubles hardly, and was deeply shocked and distressed by sad
news of any kind. I have heard him say that he often had great difficulty
in forcing himself to open a letter which he thought likely to be
distressing or unpleasant. He was naturally, I imagine, of an almost
neurotic tendency; but he did not seem so much to combat this by occupation
and determination as to have arrived at some mechanical way of dealing with
it. I remember that he said to me once: "If you have a bad business on
hand, an unhappy or wounding affair, it is best to receive it fully and
quietly. Let it do its worst, realise it, take it in--don't resist it,
don't try to distract your mind: see the full misery of it, don't attempt
to minimise it. If you do that, you will suddenly find something within you
come to your rescue and say, 'Well, I can bear that!' and then it is all
right. But if you try to dodge it, it's my experience that there comes a
kind of back-wash which hurts very much indeed. Let the stream go over you,
and then emerge. To fight against it simply prolongs the agony." He
certainly recovered himself quicker than anyone I have ever known: indeed I
think his recuperation was the best sign of his enormous vitality. "I'm
sensitive," he said to me once, "but I'm tough--I have a fearful power of
forgetting--it's m