in most of his writings; his great affection for
children. In "A Child's Garden of Verse," delightful as it is, and not
to be read without "a great inclination to cry," the child is himself,
the child "that is gone." But, in an early letter, he writes: "Kids is
what is the matter with me ... Children are too good to be true." He had
a natural infatuation, so to say, for children as children, which many
men of the pen overcome with no apparent difficulty. He could not
overcome it; little boys and girls were his delight, and he was theirs.
At Molokai, the Leper Island, he played croquet with the little girls;
refusing to wear gloves, lest he should remind them of their condition.
Sensitive and weak in body as he was, Nelson was not more fearless. It
was equally characteristic of another quality of his, the open hand,
that he gave a grand piano to these leper children.

He says:

"But the nearest friends are the auldest friends,
And the grave's the place to seek them."

Among the nearest and the oldest friends of his I never was, but to few
friends, nearer and older, does my _desiderium_ go back so frequently;
simply because almost every day brings something newly learned or known,
which would have appealed most to his unequaled breadth of knowledge
and interest and sympathy.

ANDREW LANG.

AN INLAND VOYAGE

"Thus sang they in the English boat."

MARVELL.

_TO_

_SIR WALTER GRINDLAY SIMPSON, BART._

_My dear "Cigarette,"_

_It was enough that you should have shared so liberally in the rains and
portages of our voyage; that you should have had so hard a paddle to
recover the derelict "Arethusa" on the flooded Oise: and that you should
thenceforth have piloted a mere wreck of mankind to Origny
Sainte-Benoite and a supper so eagerly desired. It was perhaps more than
enough, as you once somewhat piteously complained, that I should have
set down all the strong language to you, and kept the appropriate
reflections for myself. I could not in decency expose you to share the
disgrace of another and more public shipwreck. But now that this voyage
of ours is going into a cheap edition, that peril, we shall hope, is at
an end, and I may put your name on the burgee._

_But I cannot pause till I have lamented the fate of our two ships. That,
sir, was not a fortunate day when we projected the possession of a canal
barge; it was not a fortunate day when we shared our daydream with the
most ho