was always a struggle against ill-health. But he had Matthew's kindness,
and Matthew's humor--the "chaff" between the two brothers was
endless!--and a large allowance of William's charm. His unconscious talk
in his last illness was often of children. He seemed to see them before
him in the country school-rooms, where his coming--the coming of "the
tall gentleman with the kind blue eyes," as an eye-witness describes
him--was a festa, excellent official though he was. He carried
enthusiasm into the cause of popular education, and that is not a very
common enthusiasm in this country of ours. Yet the cause is nothing more
nor less than the cause of _the international intelligence_, and its
sharpening for the national tasks. But education has always been the
Cinderella of politics; this nation apparently does not love to be
taught! Those who grapple with its stubbornness in this field can never
expect the ready palm that falls to the workers in a dozen other fields.
But in the seed sown, and the human duty done, they find their reward.

"Aunt Mary," Arnold's second daughter, I have already spoken of. When my
father and mother reached England from Tasmania, she had just married
again, a Leicestershire clergyman, with a house and small estate near
Loughborough. Her home--Woodhouse--on the borders of Charnwood Forest,
and the beautiful Beaumanoir Park, was another fairyland to me and to my
cousins. Its ponds and woods and reed-beds; its distant summer-house
between two waters, where one might live and read and dream through long
summer hours, undisturbed; its pleasant rooms, above all the "tapestry
room" where I generally slept, and which I always connected with the
description of the huntsman on the "arras," in "Tristram and Iseult";
the Scott novels I devoured there, and the "Court" nights at Beaumanoir,
where some feudal customs were still kept up, and its beautiful
mistress, Mrs. Herrick, the young wife of an old man, queened it very
graciously over neighbors and tenants--all these are among the lasting