Just when her gentle life flickered out in sleep, I read in Grinnell’s “Pawnee Hero Stories”—“The sun was glad. He gave them great age. They were never sick. When they were very old, one morning their children said, ‘Awake, rise and eat.’ They did not move. In the night, in sleep, without pain, their shadows had departed for the sandhills.”
To Hugh Bryans.
“June 20, 1893.—I was in London a long time, but saw and heard little of interest. At Mr. Knowles’s one day I met the honest sturdy Miss Octavia Hill, and another day Bret Harte, a young-old man, with white hair and an unwrinkled rosy face. It was odd to hear him called ‘Mr. Harte.’ After luncheon Mr. Knowles read Tennyson’s ‘Boadicea’ in a weird monotonous kind of chaunt, imitating him exactly, I should think. He said that was the way Tennyson always wished his poems to be read—straight on, without emphasis or any change of voice. One day I went with the Lowthers to draw at Fulham, and we had tea delightfully in the open air with the Bishop and Mrs. Temple, he helping his boy meanwhile to do Latin verses. George Lefevre had a great pleasant party at the old palace at Kew, to which we went by the river, and where we saw the Tecks with their daughter and the Duke of York a very little while before their marriage. For this I saw the picturesque procession capitally.”
To Viscount Halifax.
“October 20, 1893.—I have been little away from home all summer, being so busy with my Waterford Memorial, at which I have certainly worked con amore.
“One little frisk I have had to Montacute, whence Mrs. Phelips took me to see two fine old houses, Barrington, and Wolferton near Dorchester. Then I was three pleasant days with Lord Arthur Hervey, the delightful old Bishop of Bath and Wells, in his moated fortified palace, as picturesque and as beautiful as it could possibly be. How attractive is all the apple-filled neighbourhood of Avalon—‘the Apple Island’—and how delightful its legends of Arthur if one seeks them.
“‘As Arthur ever still in British memory lives,’ says the inscription at Cardeña on the tomb of the Cid, but I fear few think of him where he lived. The Bishop took me to Cheddar. How very grand it is! We mounted by a coombe into the hills, and so descended upon the gorge. ‘Imagine yourself a river working its way down,’ said the Bishop, as the narrow ravine opened beneath us with its great purple rocks in labyrinthine windings of inexpressible beauty. Very lovely, too, I thought the little lake at the bottom, covered with a kind of ranunculus unknown elsewhere.
“The Bishop talks freely on all subjects with perfect ease and simplicity, in the repose of a mind at rest and the humility of real knowledge. He was much occupied with the question as to whether the children of Israel were 200 or 400 years in the wilderness, all depending upon where a stop ought to be placed. He was also full of derivations of names, and mentioned several interesting ones—Bevan, ap Evan; Bethel, ap Ithil; Coblentz, confluence; and Snowdon and Ben Nevis, meaning the same thing. He talked of having known Madame de Gontaut long ago, and how, when Louis XVIII. did something she could not approve, she always turned his portrait to the wall. The last time he went to see her, the servant said, ‘Depuis qu’elle est en enfance, Madame la Duchesse ne reçoit pas.’ He told of having been in his childhood at the ball which George IV. gave to children, and how a little girl being asked there what she would like to have, said, ‘I should like to have too much.’ In his room hung a beautiful engraving from Millet’s ‘Angelus,’ which he aptly called ‘the picture of the good lout’[512]
