g coming, and
to ask his enjoyment of it, quite apart from such application to himself
as it might have. It was impossible to meet this look and to resent
whatever might go with it. Thus a friend of his, who wished to write
telling books but could not quite do it, came to him in haste one day
and exclaimed, aggrievedly, "Look here, Douglas, is this true that was
told me--that you said my last book was the worst I'd ever written?"
Douglas gazed earnestly into the flushed and troubled face, and said,
in his softest tones, "Oh no, my dear fellow, that isn't what I said at
all; what I did say was that it was the worst book anybody ever wrote."
Such a retort, so delivered, could not but placate even an outraged
author.

Of Charles Reade my father saw little, and was not impressed by what he
saw; but Reade, writing of him to my sister Una, five-and-twenty years
after, said, "Your father had the most magnificent eye that I ever
saw in a human head." Reade was just past forty at the time he met my
father, and had just published _It Is Never Too Late to Mend_--the
first of his great series of reform novels. Christie Johnstone and
Peg Woffington were very clever, and written with immense vigor and
keenness, but did not give the measure of the man. I doubt if my father
had as yet read any of them; but later he was very fond of Reade's
writings. Certainly he could not but have been moved by The Cloister and
the Hearth, the greatest and most beautiful of all historical novels. He
saw in him only a tall, athletic, light-haired man with blue eyes. I
was more fortunate. I not only came to know Reade in 1879, but also
knew several persons who knew him intimately and loved and admired him
prodigiously; they were all in one story about him. He was then still
tall and athletic, but his wavy hair and beard were gray; his face was
one of the most sensitive men's faces I ever saw, and his forehead was
straight and fine, full of observation and humor; his eyes were by turns
tender and sparkling. There was a great deal of the feminine in Reade,
together with his robust and aggressive masculinity. The fault of his
head was its lack of depth; there was not much distance from the ear to
the nostril, and the backhead was deficient. It was high above. There
was a discord or incongruity in his nature, which made his life not
what could be called a happy one. He had the impulses of the radical and
reformer, but not the iron or the impassivity which wo