The Romance of a Pro-Consul | Page 7

helped age to a seat in a public vehicle, and the bricklayer quenched the fire of his pipe because the smoke annoyed a lady sitting behind him.
Sir George would have built a bricklayer's statue on the best site that London could provide. Not that he was fond of statues, unless they happened likewise to be art; but that such a one would have carried its meaning. There was already a statue of himself at Cape Town, and his Auckland admirers had a scheme for another.
'No doubt they'll take care it does you justice,' he was joked.
'Well, I don't know,' he answered, a smile puckering his face, 'but perhaps they should wait until I'm gone. They might want to pull it down again, if I did not behave all right. Now, that would hurt my feelings.'

III YOUTH THE BIOGRAPHER
One to whom the beyond is near, who has the kindled vision, probably best sees the life he has lived, in the beginnings--child, boy, and youth. There are no smudges on that mirror.
The stage of being which we call childhood had an endless charm for Sir George Grey, and often that drew him back to his own early years. The little child, a bundle of prattling innocence, still on the banks of the world's highway, like a daisy nodding into the flying stream, was in his sight almost a divinity. Here was the most beautiful, the most perfect manifestation of the Creator; an atmosphere where the wisest felt themselves the babes.
'You are the one Englishman living,' Olive Schreiner, when in England, wrote to Sir George before calling upon him, 'of whom I should like to say that I had shaken his hand.'
But it would not, she continued, be the first time they had met, for, during his rule of Cape Colony, he had visited the mission station where her parents dwelt. She thought this was while Prince Alfred was on his tour in South Africa; anyhow, when she was an infant, a few months old, ailing, hardly expected to live. The Governor took her in his arms, saying, as her mother related to her, 'Poor little baby! is it so ill?'
'When the other children teased me,'--Olive Schreiner had her triumph from the incident--'I could say to them, "Ah, but you were not held in the arms of Sir George Grey;" and that was safe to bring about an increased respect on their part towards me.'
Taking his walks in Kensington Gardens, Sir George would make friendships among the small people whose nursery coaches are there the swell of a thoroughfare. On the second occasion of meeting he might be expected, with a fine show of mystery, to produce a toy from his pocket. 'It's so easy,' he remarked, 'to convert these gardens into a fairy-land for some child whose name you only know because the nurse told it you.' Then, a favourite would not be met one day, or the next, and Sir George would feel a blank in his walk.
At his own fireside, a girlie with rosy, dimpled cheeks, straightway made him her subject, by the simple trust with which she took his out- stretched hand, cuddled on to his knee, and sat enthroned. She confirmed a victory, that he regarded as all his, in a most faithful treatment of tea-cakes, protesting at every mouthful, 'Oh, no, I sha'n't be ill; I _won't_ be ill!'
It had been the same when Sir George was among the Aborigines of Australia, for the children promptly made friends with him. The grown natives, never having seen a white before, had sense to be scared. Their bairns merely had intuition, and it took them to Sir George's side, which, again, brought in the parents.
Studying a portrait of his own father he mused: 'The child that has never known both parents, must be conscious of having missed part of its inheritance in the world.' He had been thus robbed, a few days before his birth, by the slaughter at Badajoz, where Colonel Grey fell, a gallant soldier, scarce past thirty.
To a problem which the youngest child carries lightly, Sir George had given much thought, namely, 'Of what does human life consist? what are its elements?' Thereon he had the deliverance:
'Quite early in my own life, I formed the opinion that we had neglected to consider an element of existence; that besides the solids and the fluids there was ether. It seemed to me that ether played a very important part, alike in the creation and the maintenance of life. That was the everlasting ingredient, the something which never perished, but went on and on, the soul in the body of flesh and blood. Brought into contact with various eminent men, I was happily able to discuss such vital questions with them.'
Sir George's mother first set him thinking, and he