to fail." He tried it once, it seems, in a race train to Kempton Park,
and afterwards he had to buy a new hat. That incident, indeed, gives you
the very essence of Bagarrow in his insidious attacks on evil. I
remember that on another occasion he went out of his way to promise a
partially intoxicated man a drink; and taking him into a public-house
ordered two lemon squashes! Drinks! He liked lemon squash himself and he
did not like beer, and he thought he had only to introduce the poor
fallen creature to the delights of temperance to ensure his conversion
there and then. I think he expected the man to fall upon him, crying "My
benefactor!" But he did not say "My benefactor," at anyrate, though he
fell upon him, cheerfully enough.

To avoid the appearance of priggishness, which he dreads with some
reason, he even went so far as to procure a herb tobacco, which he
smokes with the help of frequent sulphur matches. This he recommends to
us strongly. "Won't you try it?" he says, with a winning smile. "Just
once." And he is the only man I ever met who drinks that facetious
fluid, non-alcoholic beer. Once he proposed to wean me upon that from my
distinctive vice, which led indeed to our first rupture. "_I_ find it
delicious," he said in pathetic surprise.

It is one of his most inveterate habits to tell you quietly what he
does, or would do under the circumstances. Seeing you at Kipling, he
will propound the proposition that "all true literature has a distinct
aim." His test of literary merit is "What good does it do you?" He is a
great lender of books, especially of Carlyle and Ruskin, which authors
for some absolutely inscrutable reason he considers provocative of
Bagarrowism, and he goes to the County Council lectures on dairy-work,
because it encourages others to improve themselves. But I have said
enough to display him, and of Bagarrow at least--as I can well
testify--it is easy to have more than enough. Indeed, after whole days
with him I have gone home to dream of the realisation of his ideals, a
sort of Bagarrow millennium, a world of Bagarrows. All kinds of
men--Falstaffs, Don Quixotes, Alan Stewarts, John the Baptists, John
Knoxes, Quilps, and Benvenuto Cellinis--all, so to speak, Bagarrowed,
all with clean cuffs, tight umbrellas, and temperate ways, passing to
and fro in a regenerate earth.

And so he goes on his way through this wonderful universe with his eyes
fixed upon two or three secondary things, without th