It was as if the curious courtesy and fineness of that character
I was to meet went out from him upon the valley; for I felt
on all these things the finger of that quality which the old
English called "faerie"; it is the quality which those can
never understand who think of the past as merely brutal;
it is an ancient elegance such as there is in trees.
I went through the garden and saw an old man sitting by a table,
looking smallish in his big chair. He was already an invalid,
and his hair and beard were both white; not like snow, for snow
is cold and heavy, but like something feathery, or even fierce;
rather they were white like the white thistledown. I came up
quite close to him; he looked at me as he put out his frail hand,
and I saw of a sudden that his eyes were startlingly young.
He was the one great man of the old world whom I have met
who was not a mere statue over his own grave.

He was deaf and he talked like a torrent. He did not talk about
the books he had written; he was far too much alive for that.
He talked about the books he had not written. He unrolled
a purple bundle of romances which he had never had time to sell.
He asked me to write one of the stories for him, as he would
have asked the milkman, if he had been talking to the milkman.
It was a splendid and frantic story, a sort of astronomical farce.
It was all about a man who was rushing up to the Royal Society
with the only possible way of avoiding an earth-destroying comet;
and it showed how, even on this huge errand, the man was tripped
up at every other minute by his own weakness and vanities;
how he lost a train by trifling or was put in gaol for brawling.
That is only one of them; there were ten or twenty more.
Another, I dimly remember, was a version of the fall of Parnell;