county ball, a distance of many miles, and, on the way home through
the frosty and snowy night, the family-coach had suddenly stopped:
there was a crowd of dark figures in the way...at which point
Swinburne stopped too, before saying, with an ineffable smile and in a
voice faint with appreciation, `They were burying a suicide at the
crossroads.'

Vivid as this Hogarthian night-scene was to me, I saw beside it
another scene: a great panelled room, a grim old woman in a high-
backed chair, and, restless on a stool at her feet an extraordinary
little nephew with masses of auburn hair and with tiny hands clasped
in supplication--`Tell me more, Aunt Ashburnham, tell me more!'

And now, clearlier still, as I write in these after-years, do I see
that dining-room of The Pines; the long white stretch of table-cloth,
with Swinburne and Watts-Dunton and another at the extreme end of it;
Watts-Dunton between us, very low down over his plate, very cosy and
hirsute, and rather like the dormouse at that long tea-table which
Alice found in Wonderland. I see myself sitting there wide-eyed, as
Alice sat. And, had the hare been a great poet, and the hatter a great
gentleman, and neither of them mad but each only very odd and
vivacious, I might see Swinburne as a glorified blend of those two.

When the meal ended--for, alas! it was not, like that meal in
Wonderland, unending--Swinburne would dart round the table, proffer
his hand to me, bow deeply, bow to Watts-Dunton also, and disappear.
`He always walks in the morning, writes in the afternoon, and reads in
the evening,' Watts-Dunton would say with a touch of tutorial pride in
this regimen.