he same time very decidedly kind, such as I had not
seen it for a good while before my final resignation. She gave me
her hand, a thing which is, I apprehended, rather rare with men,
and which had never happened with me during all my life, though
that life, be it remembered, had included some periods of rather
decided favour. Catherine sat down near her, and I at a little
distance. For a good many years she had habitually asked me to
sit. My wife spoke freely and a good deal to the Queen, but the
answers appeared to me to be very slight. As to myself, I
expressed satisfaction at the favourable accounts I had heard of
the accommodation at Cimiez, and perhaps a few more words of
routine. To speak frankly, it seemed to me that the Queen's
peculiar faculty and habit of conversation had disappeared. It was
a faculty, not so much the free offspring of a rich and powerful
mind, as the fruit of assiduous care with long practice and much
opportunity. After about ten minutes, it was signified to us that
we had to be presented to all the other royalties, and so passed
the remainder of this meeting.

In the early autumn of 1897 he found himself affected by (M186) what was
supposed to be a peculiar form of catarrh. He went to stay with Mr.
Armitstead at Butterstone in Perthshire. I saw him on several occasions
afterwards, but this was the last time when I found him with all the
freedom, full self-possession, and kind geniality of old days. He was
keenly interested at my telling him that I had seen James Martineau a few
days before, in his cottage further north in Inverness-shire; that
Martineau, though he had now passed his ninety-second milestone on life's
road, was able to walk five or six hundred feet up his hillside every day,
was at his desk at eight each morning, and read theology a good many hours
before he went to bed at night. Mr. Gladstone's conversation was varied,
glowing, full of reminiscence. He had written me in the previous May,
hoping among other kind things that "we may live more and more in sympathy
and communion." I never saw him more attractive than in the short pleasant
talks of these three or four days. He discussed some of the sixty or
seventy men with whom he had been associated in cabinet life,(313) freely
but charitably, though he named two whom he thought to have behaved worse
to him than others. He repeated his expression of enormous ad