w of the visitors were deaf, and hugged the belief
that they were the victims of a new kind of fancy-fair swindle. Of the
others, many who came to scoff remained to take raffle tickets; and one
of the phonographs was finally disposed of in this way." The other
remained in Fleeming's hands, and was a source of infinite occupation.
Once it was sent to London, "to bring back on the tinfoil the tones of a
lady distinguished for clear vocalisation"; at another time "Sir Robert
Christison was brought in to contribute his powerful bass"; and there
scarcely came a visitor about the house but he was made the subject of
experiment. The visitors, I am afraid, took their parts lightly: Mr.
Hole and I, with unscientific laughter, commemorating various shades of
Scottish accent, or proposing to "teach the poor dumb animal to swear."
But Fleeming and Mr. Ewing, when we butterflies were gone, were
laboriously ardent. Many thoughts that occupied the later years of my
friend were caught from the small utterance of that toy. Thence came his
inquiries into the roots of articulate language and the foundations of
literary art; his papers on vowel-sounds, his papers in the _Saturday
Review_ upon the laws of verse, and many a strange approximation, many a
just note, thrown out in talk and now forgotten. I pass over dozens of
his interests, and dwell on this trifling matter of the phonograph,
because it seems to me that it depicts the man. So, for Fleeming, one
thing joined into another, the greater with the less. He cared not where
it was he scratched the surface of the ultimate mystery--in the child's
toy, in the great tragedy, in the laws of the tempest, or in the
properties of energy or mass--certain that whatever he touched, it was a
part of life--and however he touched it, there would flow for his happy
constitution interest and delight. "All fables have their morals," says
Thoreau, "but the innocent enjoy the story." There is a truth
represented for the imagination in those lines of a noble poem, where we
are told that in our highest hours of visionary clearness we can but

"see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."

To this clearness Fleeming had attained; and although he heard the voice
of the eternal seas and weighed its message, he was yet able, until the
end of his life, to sport upon these shores of death and mystery with
the gaiety and innocence of children.

IV

It was