f school-children. The address
was quite inadequate and the unfortunate visitor had a rather cool
reception. Freeman was only one of many in all this. The astronomer
R.A. Proctor came to similar grief for a similar _gaucherie_, and
even so famous a man as Lord Kelvin suffered in like manner. I have
been told that at Yale University when addressing a college audience
zealous for their own institution, he stumbled badly on the threshold
by enlarging on the great privilege he was enjoying in speaking to the
students of Cornell, proceeding blandly under the conviction that
he was at Ithaca instead of under the elms of New Haven. But this
clumsiness in Freeman and in others was only a surface blemish. He was
a great writer treating with profound learning the story of Greece and
Rome and South-western Europe in general, and illuminating as probably
no other man has done the distant Saxon and early Norman dimnesses
that lie in the background of our own past. I held him in thorough
respect and when, following an article I had prepared in London
for the _Pall Mall Gazette_, I received a polite note from him
inviting me to come to see him at Somerleaze near Wells, I was much
rejoiced. I went thither, passing through the beautiful green heart of
England. In Wiltshire from the car-window I caught sight of a distant
down on which, the substratum of chalk showing through the turf
skilfully cut away, appeared the figure of a gigantic white horse, the
memorial of an old Saxon battle; thence passing near Glastonbury
and skirting the haunts of ancient Druids in the Mendip Hills, I was
attuned for a meeting with a scholar who more than any other man of
the time had aroused interest in the old life of England. I alighted
at Wells where a trap was waiting, and drove between hedgerows for
two miles to the secluded mansion. It lay back from the road, a roomy
manor house thickly surrounded by groves and gardens. I was put at
ease at once by the friendly welcome of Mrs. Freeman, a charming
hostess who met me at the door. Freeman soon entered, a veteran of
sixty, his florid English face set off by a long beard, and hair
rather dishevelled, tawny, and streaked with gray. Like Gardiner he
was of vigorous mould and we presently strode off together through the
lanes of the estate with the sweet landscape all about us. His talk
was animated and related for the most part to the objects which we
passed and the points that came into view on the more dist