s I can
say: I do not remember one single malicious act done to myself. In fact,
it is rather awkward when I have to say the Lord's Prayer. I have
nobody's trespasses to forgive." And to the point, I remember one of our
discussions. I said it was a dangerous error not to admit there were bad
people; he, that it was only a confession of blindness on our part, and
that we probably called others bad only so far as we were wrapped in
ourselves and lacking in the transmigratory forces of imagination. I
undertook to describe to him three persons irredeemably bad, and whom he
should admit to be so. In the first case he denied my evidence: "You
cannot judge a man upon such testimony," said he. For the second, he
owned it made him sick to hear the tale; but then there was no spark of
malice, it was mere weakness I had described, and he had never denied
nor thought to set a limit to man's weakness. At my third gentleman he
struck his colours. "Yes," said he, "I'm afraid that _is_ a bad man."
And then, looking at me shrewdly: "I wonder if it isn't a very
unfortunate thing for you to have met him." I showed him radiantly how
it was the world we must know, the world as it was, not a world
expurgated and prettified with optimistic rainbows. "Yes, yes," said he;
"but this badness is such an easy, lazy explanation. Won't you be
tempted to use it, instead of trying to understand people?"

In the year 1878 he took a passionate fancy for the phonograph: it was a
toy after his heart, a toy that touched the skirts of life, art and
science, a toy prolific of problems and theories. Something fell to be
done for a University Cricket-Ground Bazaar. "And the thought struck
him," Mr. Ewing writes to me, "to exhibit Edison's phonograph, then the
very newest scientific marvel. The instrument itself was not to be
purchased--I think no specimen had then crossed the Atlantic,--but a
copy of the _Times_ with an account of it was at hand, and by the help
of this we made a phonograph which to our great joy talked, and talked,
too, with the purest American accent. It was so good that a second
instrument was got ready forthwith. Both were shown at the Bazaar: one
by Mrs. Jenkin, to people willing to pay half a crown for a private view
and the privilege of hearing their own voices, while Jenkin, perfervid
as usual, gave half-hourly lectures on the other in an adjoining
room--I, as his lieutenant, taking turns. The thing was in its way a
little triumph. A fe