sest felt
themselves the babes.

'You are the one Englishman living,' Olive Schreiner, when in England,
wrote to Sir George before calling upon him, 'of whom I should like to
say that I had shaken his hand.'

But it would not, she continued, be the first time they had met, for,
during his rule of Cape Colony, he had visited the mission station where
her parents dwelt. She thought this was while Prince Alfred was on his
tour in South Africa; anyhow, when she was an infant, a few months old,
ailing, hardly expected to live. The Governor took her in his arms,
saying, as her mother related to her, 'Poor little baby! is it so ill?'

'When the other children teased me,'--Olive Schreiner had her triumph
from the incident--'I could say to them, "Ah, but you were not held in
the arms of Sir George Grey;" and that was safe to bring about an
increased respect on their part towards me.'

Taking his walks in Kensington Gardens, Sir George would make friendships
among the small people whose nursery coaches are there the swell of a
thoroughfare. On the second occasion of meeting he might be expected,
with a fine show of mystery, to produce a toy from his pocket. 'It's so
easy,' he remarked, 'to convert these gardens into a fairy-land for some
child whose name you only know because the nurse told it you.' Then, a
favourite would not be met one day, or the next, and Sir George would
feel a blank in his walk.

At his own fireside, a girlie with rosy, dimpled cheeks, straightway made
him her subject, by the simple trust with which she took his out-
stretched hand, cuddled on to his knee, and sat enthroned. She confirmed
a victory, that he regarded as all his, in a most faithful treatment of
tea-cakes, protesting at every mouthful, 'Oh, no, I sha'n't be ill; I
_won't_ be ill!'

It had been the same when Sir George was among the Aborigines of
Australia, for the children promptly made friends with him. The grown
natives, never having seen a white before, had sense to be scared. Their
bairns merely had intuition, and it took them to Sir George's side,
which, again, brought in the parents.

Studying a portrait of his own father he mused: 'The child that has never
known both parents, must be conscious of having missed part of its
inheritance in the world.' He had been thus robbed, a few days before his
birth, by the slaughter at Badajoz, where Colonel Grey fell, a gallant
soldier, scarce past thirty.

To a problem which the youngest c