in unexpected ways, as when he gave
my laundress a shilling because it was "such a beastly foggy morning";
nor of his slightly archaic courtliness--unless among people he knew well
he usually left the room backwards, bowing to the company; nor of his
punctiliousness, industry, and painstaking attention to detail--he kept
accurate accounts not only of all his property by double entry but also
of his daily expenditure, which he balanced to a halfpenny every evening,
and his handwriting, always beautiful and legible, was more so at sixty-
six than at twenty-six; nor of his patience and cheerfulness during years
of anxiety when he had few to sympathize with him; nor of the strange
mixture of simplicity and shrewdness that caused one who knew him well to
say: "Il sait tout; il ne sait rien; il est poete."

Epitaphs always fascinated him, and formerly he used to say he should
like to be buried at Langar and to have on his tombstone the subject of
the last of Handel's _Six Great Fugues_. He called this "The Old Man
Fugue," and said it was like an epitaph composed for himself by one who
was very old and tired and sorry for things; and he made young Ernest
Pontifex in _The Way of All Flesh_ offer it to Edward Overton as an
epitaph for his Aunt Alethea. Butler, however, left off wanting any
tombstone long before he died. In accordance with his wish his body was
cremated, and a week later Alfred and I returned to Woking and buried his
ashes under the shrubs in the garden of the crematorium, with nothing to
mark the spot.

Footnotes:

{1} I am indebted to one of Butler's contemporaries at Cambridge, the
Rev. Dr. T. G. Bonney, F.R.S., and also to Mr. John F. Harris, both of
St. John's College, for help in finding and dating Butler's youthful
contributions to the _Eagle_.

{2} This gentleman, on the death of his father in 1866, became the Rev.
Sir Philip Perring, Bart.

{3} The late Sir Julius von Haast, K.C.M.G., appointed Provincial
Geologist in 1860, was ennobled by the Austrian Government and knighted
by the British. He died in 1887.

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