working man got out to deposit the scholar's Gladstone bag upon the platform while his wife passed out his umbrella, and another working man handled delicately a parcel of books. The scholar shook hands with every one of his fellow-passengers including children, and then I presented myself, and looked him in the face. He was rather over six feet in height, and erect as a sapling, dressed in old-fashioned and well brushed black clothes, and his face placed me immediately at ease, for though it was massive and grave, with deep lines and crowned with thick white hair, his eyes were so friendly and sincere, had such an expression of modesty and affection, that even then, and on the first experience, I forgot the gulf between us. Next instant, and almost before I had mentioned my name he seized me by the hand, and thanked me for my coming. 

 “This, my good sir,” he said with his old-fashioned courtesy, “is a kindness which I never for an instant anticipated, and when I remember your many important engagements (important!) and the sacrifice which this gracious act (gracious!) must have entailed upon you, I feel this to be an honour, sir, for which you will accept this expression of gratitude.” It seemed as if there must have been something wrong in our imagination of a great man's manner, and when he insisted, beyond my preventing, in carrying his bag himself, and would only allow me with many remonstrances to relieve him of the books; when I had difficulty in persuading him to enter a cab because he was anxious to walk to our house, our fancy portrait had almost disappeared. Before leaving the platform he had interviewed the guard and thanked him by both word and deed for certain “gracious and mindful attentions in the course of the journey.”  

 My wife acknowledged that she had been waiting to give the great man afternoon tea in fear and trembling, but there was something about him so winsome that she did not need even to study my face, but felt at once that however trying writing-women and dilletante critics might be, one could be at home with a chief scholar. When I described the guests who were coming—to meet him at dinner—such eminent persons as I could gather—he was overcome by the trouble we had taken, but also alarmed lest he should be hardly fit for their company, being, as he explained himself, a man much restricted in knowledge through the just burden of professional studies. And before he went to his room to dress he had struck up an acquaintance with the youngest member of the family, who seemed to have forgotten that our guest was a very great man, and had visited a family of Japanese mice with evident satisfaction. During dinner he 

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