increase with you?"

"It has not done so perceptibly in recent years. I judge I've taken
more chloral than any man whatever: Marshall says if I were put into a
Turkish bath I should sweat it at every pore."

There was something in his tone suggesting that he was even proud of the
accomplishment. To me it was a frightful revelation, accounting entirely
for what had puzzled and distressed me in his delusions already referred
to. And now let me say that whilst it would have been on my part the
most pitiful weakness (because the most foolish tearfulness of injuring
a great man who was strong enough to suffer a good deal to be discounted
from his strength), to attempt to conceal this painful side of
Rossetti's mind, I shall not again allude to those delusions, unless
it be to show that, coming to him with the drug which blighted half his
life, they disappeared when it had been removed.

None may rightly say to what the use of that drug was due, or what was
due to it; the sadder side of his life was ever under its shadow; his
occasional distrust of friends: his fear of enemies: his broken health
and shattered spirits, all came of his indulgence in the pernicious
thing. When I remember this I am more than willing to put by all thought
of the little annoyances, which to me, as to other immediate friends,
were constantly occurring through that cause, which seemed at the moment
so vexatious and often so insupportable, but which are now forgotten.

Next morning--(a clear autumn morning)--I strolled through the large
garden at the back of the house, and of course I found it of a piece
with what I had previously seen. A beautiful avenue of lime-trees opened
into a grass plot of nearly an acre in extent. The trees were just as
nature made them, and so was the grass, which in places was lying long,
dry and withered under the sun, weeds creeping up in damp places, and
the gravel of the pathway scattered upon the verges. This neglected
condition of the garden was, I afterwards found, humorously charged upon
Mr. Watts's "reluctance to interfere with nature in her clever scheme of
the survival of the fittest," but I suspect it was due at least equally
to the owner's personal indifference to everything of the kind.

Before leaving I glanced over the bookcase. Rossetti's library was by
no means a large one. It consisted, perhaps, of 1000 volumes, scarcely
more; and though this was not large as comprising the library of one
whose reading