One of his colleagues in the school where he was a master, told me
that Arthur had once given him a most delicate and pointed rebuke on
the practice into which he had fallen, of appealing to a boy's home
feelings before the class.

"Some things ought to be said to people when they are alone; besides,
we must not _seethe the kid in his mother's milk_."

The same man told me that he heard him give a little address to the
boys in his class, on the two main virtues of a schoolboy—purity and
honesty—on the words, "And they said, Lord, behold, here are two
swords; and he said unto them, It is enough."

Those are the only two anecdotes I have heard of his professional
life, both illustrating that extraordinary gift of apt quotation and
seeing unexpected connections, which, to my mind, is as adequate an
external symbol of genius as can be found, though sometimes illusory.

He took the greatest delight in the society of children. He writes—

"What wonderful lines those are of Tennyson's"—they had just come
out,—"'Who pleased her with a babbling heedlessness Which often
lured her from herself!' There is nothing more absolutely refreshing
when one is overdone or anxious, or oppressed by the vague anxieties
of the world, than the conversation and the society of children,
the unconscious ignoring of all grave possibilities, yet often
accompanied by that curious tact which divines that all is not
well with their older friend, and prompts them to employ all their
resources to beguile it. I have been thanked by worldly mothers, in