ew him from his portraits at
a glance and I was assured of his identity, if any assurance had been
necessary, by the profound and flattering deference which was paid to
him by the officials and by the unanimity with which the students in the
big circular hall found it necessary to pass the place at which he had
taken his seat. He was not there more than a quarter of an hour, and
during that time he behaved quite like an ordinary mortal except when
he once produced a dark red handkerchief of enormous size and broke the
silence of the place by a nasal blast which sounded like a trumpet call
to arms. When he arose to go I arose also and followed him; I could no
more have helped it than if he had been a magnet and I a bit of iron
filing. He walked to Oxford Street and took a seat in a 'bus bound for
Chelsea. I followed and sat opposite, hardly daring to lift my eyes to
him until I found that he was wholly absorbed in the notes he had taken.
When he alighted I followed him all the way to Cheyne Walk and watched
until the door closed behind him.

A week later Dawson was lecturing at the Birkbeck Institute and I went
to hear him and afterwards drove with him to the Victoria Hotel at
Euston where he was staying for the night. I told him of the tremendous
adventure just recounted and he asked me if I would like to meet
Carlyle. In the explosive mood which came natural to seven and twenty,
I answered that I would go on my hands and knees from there to Chelsea
only to hear him speak and to be able to boast that I had shaken him by
the hand. "No need for that," said Dawson, "I'll take you to him one of
these days, when I have an hour or two to spare in town," and then he
began to tell me that he had often thought of leaving behind him some
intimate record of his association with the great man whose most popular
and familiar translator he himself had been to the people of England.
"But," he acknowledged, "I have always been too busy or too idle and
I begin to fear that that duty will never be performed. I'll tell you
what," he added suddenly, "I'll hand the whole thing over to you if
you care to have it. I make a point of going now and then down to
Rickmansworth, where I had my first cure of souls and where there are
still a few of my old friends left. We'll go down there together and
have a quiet day." Dawson began straightway to open, as it were, a bag
of samples. He told me three stories of Carlyle; they were all I ever
had from