Gloucestershire his
deafness now completely cut him off from all the neighbourly duties
which had in earlier years diversified and entertained his country life.
He had been a great figure among the squires and farmers of the
Cotswolds, but all this was now at an end, paralysed by the hopeless
decay of his hearing. It grieved him, too, that he was unable to do any
useful war-work in the county, and he was forced to depend upon his pen
and his flying visits to London for refreshment. He was a remarkably
good letter-writer, and he now demanded almost pathetically to be fed
with the apples of correspondence. He wrote (November 26th, 1915):--

"Your letters are a consolation for being deprived of taking a part
any longer in the doings of the great world. The Country
Mouse--even if the creature were able to scuttle back into the
cellars of the great--would still be out of all communion with the
mighty, owing to physical infirmity. And now comes the kind Town
Mouse and tells him all that he most cares to know."

He had books and his garden to enjoy, and he made the most of both. "I
hate the autumn," he said, "for it means the death of the year, but I
try to make the death of the garden as beautiful as possible." Among his
plants, and up and down the high places of his bamboo-feathered
rockeries, where little cascades fell with a music which he could no
longer hear into small dark pools full of many-coloured water-lilies,
his activity was like that of a boy. He had the appearance, the tastes,
the instincts of vigorous manhood prolonged far beyond the usual limit
of such gifts, and yet all were marred and rendered bankrupt for him by
the one intolerable defect, the deafness which had by this time become
almost impenetrable to sound.

Yet it seemed as though this disability actually quickened his mental
force. With the arrival of his eightieth year, his activity and
curiosity of intellect were certainly rather increased than abated. He
wrote to me from Batsford (December 28th, 1915):--

"I have been busy for the last two months making a close study of
Dante. I have read all the _Inferno_ and half of the _Purgatorio_.
It is hard work, but the 'readings' of my old schoolfellow, W.W.
Vernon, are an incalculable help, and now within the last week or
two has appeared Hoare's Italian Dictionary, published by the
Cambridge University Press. A much-needed book, for the previo