ts et des Empires de la Lune"?' I admitted, by gesture and facial
expression, that I had not. Whereupon he reeled out curious extracts
from that allegory--'almost as good as "Gulliver"'--with a memorable
instance of the way in which the traveller to the moon was shocked by
the conversation of the natives, and the natives' sense of propriety was
outraged by the conversation of the traveller.

In life, as in (that for him more truly actual thing) literature, it
was always the preterit that enthralled him. Of any passing events,
of anything the newspapers were full of, never a word from him; and I
should have been sorry if there had been. But I did, through the medium
of Watts-Dunton, sometimes start him on topics that might have led him
to talk of Rossetti and other old comrades. For me the names of those
men breathed the magic of the past, just as it was breathed for me by
Swinburne's presence. For him, I suppose, they were but a bit of the
present, and the mere fact that they had dropped out of it was not
enough to hallow them. He never mentioned them. But I was glad to see
that he revelled as wistfully in the days just before his own as I in
the days just before mine. He recounted to us things he had been told
in his boyhood by an aged aunt, or great-aunt--'one of the Ashburnhams';
how, for example, she had been taken by her mother to a county ball,
a distance of many miles, and, on the way home through the frosty and
snowy night, the family-coach had suddenly stopped: there was a crowd of
dark figures in the way...at which point Swinburne stopped too, before
saying, with an ineffable smile and in a voice faint with appreciation,
'They were burying a suicide at the crossroads.'

Vivid as this Hogarthian night-scene was to me, I saw beside it another
scene: a great panelled room, a grim old woman in a high-backed chair,
and, restless on a stool at her feet an extraordinary little nephew with
masses of auburn hair and with tiny hands clasped in supplication--'Tell
me more, Aunt Ashburnham, tell me more!'

And now, clearlier still, as I write in these after-years, do I see that
dining-room of The Pines; the long white stretch of table-cloth,
with Swinburne and Watts-Dunton and another at the extreme end of it;
Watts-Dunton between us, very low down over his plate, very cosy and
hirsute, and rather like the dormouse at that long tea-table which Alice
found in Wonderland. I see myself sitting there wide-eyed, as Alice sat.