“How could you be so unfriendly?” he said.
“Well, you see my little girl is also with her,” my father replied, “and as we are on our way to Scotland they could not very well go back to London, and I really could not ask you to house so many.”
Ruskin did not answer, but rang the bell. When the servant arrived he proceeded:
“Get such-and-such a room ready, and see the sheets are properly aired, for a lady and little girl are coming to stop. Tell the coachman I want the carriage at such-and-such an hour.”
Then turning to my father he remarked:
“At that time, Dr. Harley, you can amuse yourself. I am going to fetch your wife.”
Ruskin loved children. He and my sister Olga became tremendous friends; they used to walk out together hand in hand for hours and hours, while he explained to her about beetles, flowers, and birds, and all things in Nature which appealed to him.
Sir Joseph Swan told me an incident in Carlyle’s life which will be new to worshippers of the Sage. “So many stories,” he said, “are told of Carlyle which show him as a terribly bearish person that I take pleasure in finding in this incident that there was another and kindlier side of his nature.” It related to a young friend some thirty years before, now a middle-aged and distinguished man:
The youth was a divinity student in a Birmingham College, preparing himself for the duties of a dissenting minister. He used to make occasional visits to London, and during one of these he haunted the neighbourhood of Chelsea in the hope of meeting Carlyle, then the subject of his hero-worship. Carlyle was “shadowed,” his goings out and his comings in were watched for days together, in the far-off hope that some moment would “turn up” which would bring them into contact.