The Romance of a Pro-Consul | Page 7

in his scholar's joy. But a-top the 'bus was the working man,
homeward bound, and he was getting more out of life. Manhood was in
him, he evidently had at last a free, firm seat in the saddle of which
Providence had always held the stirrup.
The feeling of human brotherhood was wider, deeper, the benefits
springing therefrom apparent all round. Penny fares were bringing
classes into contact with each other, who were formerly as far divided
as if they had lived in different planets. The London policeman's upheld
hand, was an eloquent speech on the sacred meaning of law to a free
people. Youth 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