watched
him.

As the light of sunrise creeps over the face of some rugged rock,
it crept from chin to brow, and the pale blue eyes shone tranquil,
like water that reflects heaven.

And when it had passed it left them still open, but gems that had
lost their ray.

Death-beds are not the only things which Julie had the power of
picturing out of her inner consciousness apart from actual experience.
She was much amused by the pertinacity with which unknown
correspondents occasionally inquired after her "little ones," unable
to give her the credit of describing and understanding children unless
she possessed some of her own. There is a graceful touch at the end of
"Lob," which seems to me one of the most delicate evidences of her
universal sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men,--and women!
It is similar in character to the passage I alluded to in "Timothy's
Shoes," where they clatter away for the last time, into silence.

Even after the sobering influences of middle age had touched him,
and a wife and children bound him with the quiet ties of home, he
had (at long intervals) his "restless times," when his good
"missis" would bring out a little store laid by in one of the
children's socks, and would bid him "Be off, and get a breath of
the sea air," but on condition that the sock went with, him as his
purse. John Broom always looked ashamed to go, but he came back the
better, and his wife was quite easy in his absence with that
confidence in her knowledge of "the master," which is so mysterious
to the unmarried.

* * * * *

"The sock 'll bring him home," said Mrs. Broom, and home he came,
and never could say what he had been doing.

In 1874 Julie wrote "A Great Emergency" as a serial for the Magazine,
and took great pains to corroborate the accuracy of her descriptions
of barge life for it.[24] I remember our inspecting a barge on the
canal at Aldershot, with a friend who understood all its details, and
we arranged to go on an expedition in it to gain further experience,
but were somehow prevented. The allusions to Dartmouth arose from our
visit there, of which I have already spoken, and which took place
whilst she was writing the tale; and her knowledge of the intricacies
of the Great Eastern Railway between Fenchurch Street Station and
North Woolwich came from the experience she gained w