have
loved work as Bob never loved it, for he put the quality of his talk
into what he wrote. Bob Stevenson's writing never suggested his talk. I
might find his point of view and his amiable prejudices in his criticism
and his books--only he could have written his _Velasquez_ quite as he
wrote it--but nowhere do I find a touch, a trace of the Lantern-Bearer
or Prince Florizel or the Young Man with the Cream Tarts. But I never
get far away from Harland in his novels. I re-read them a short time
ago, and they were a magic carpet to bear me straight back to Buckingham
Street, and the crowded, smoky rooms overlooking the river, and the old
years when we were all young together.

A delightful thing about Harland was that he did not care to monopolize
the talk, to talk everybody else down. On the contrary, I doubt if he
was ever happier than when he roused, provoked, stimulated everybody to
talk with him. I remember in particular an evening when J. and I were
dining with him and Mrs. Harland at their Kensington flat, and Mr. and
Mrs. Edmund Gosse were there, and Mr. and Mrs. W.J. Fisher--Fisher was
then editor of the _Daily Chronicle_ and Mrs. Fisher was still Adrienne
Dayrolles on the stage--and Louis Austen, a handy man of journalism, and
when, happening to turn for a minute from Harland by whom I was sitting,
and to look round the table, I found I was the only one of the party not
talking--and we had got no farther than the fish! But I flatter myself I
have few rivals as an accomplished listener.

Often Harland had the floor to himself simply because everybody else
wanted to listen too. When what he calls in one of his books "the
restorative spirit of nonsense" descended upon him, his talk could
whisk off the whole Thursday night crowd, before they knew it, to that
delectable Land of Nonsense to which he was an inspired guide. Nobody
understood better how to set up the absurd and the impossible in the
garb of truth. An old admirer of his reminded me not long since of a
tale he used to tell, almost with tears in his voice, of the _petit
patissier_ who was hurrying through the streets of Paris to deliver
_brioches_ and tarts to customers and who, crossing the Boulevards, was
knocked down by a big three-horse omnibus. And as the crowd collected
and the _sergent-de-ville_ arrived, he was seen painfully and
deliberately freeing his one uninjured arm, feeling carefully in pocket
after pocket, and, as he drew his last breath, h