rhaps to drink; but by the perambulator walked a little
boy, seven or eight years old, grotesquely clothed in patched and
clumsy garments; he held on to the rim, dirty, unkempt; but he was
happy too; he was with his mother, of whom he had no fear; he had been
fed as the birds are fed; he had no anxious thoughts of the future, and
as he went, he crooned to himself a soft song, like the piping of a
finch in a wayside thicket. What was in his tiny mind and heart? I do
not know; but perhaps a little touch of the peace of God.

November 26, 1888.

Another visitor! I am not sure that his visit is not a more
distinguished testimonial than any I have yet received. He is a young
Don with a very brilliant record indeed. He wrote to ask if he might
have the honour of calling, and renewing a very slight acquaintance. He
came and conquered. I am still crushed and battered by his visit. I
feel like a land that has been harried by an invading army. Let me see
if, dizzy and unmanned as I am, I call recall some of the incidents of
his visit. He has only been gone an hour, yet I feel as though a month
had elapsed since he entered the room, since I was a moderately happy
man. He is a very pleasant fellow to look at, small, trim,
well-appointed, courteous, friendly, with a deferential air. His eyes
gleam brightly through his glasses, and he has brisk dexterous
gestures. He was genial enough till he settled down upon literature,
and since then what waves and storms have gone over me! I have or had a
grovelling taste for books; I possess a large number, and I thought I
had read them. But I feel now, not so much as if I had read the wrong
ones, but as if those I had read were only, so to speak, the anterooms
and corridors which led to the really important books--and of them, it
seems, I know nothing. Epigrams flowed from his tongue, brilliant
characterisations, admirable judgments. He had "placed" every one, and
literature to him seemed like a great mosaic in which he knew the
position of every cube. He knew all the movements and tendencies of
literature, and books seemed to him to be important, not because they
had a message for the mind and heart, but because they illustrated a
tendency, or were a connecting link in a chain. He quoted poems I had
never heard of, he named authors I had never read. He did it all
modestly and quietly enough, with no parade, (I want to do him full
justice) but with an evidently growing disappointment to fi