fagged mind--`Little is hidden from this august Lady full of the
garnered wisdom of sixty years of Sovereignty.' I remember
wildly conceiving a letter (to reach Windsor by express
messenger told to await answer):


`MADAM,--Well knowing that your Majesty is full of the
garnered wisdom of sixty years of Sovereignty, I venture to ask
your advice in the following delicate matter. Mr. Enoch
Soames, whose poems you may or may not know,'....


Was there NO way of helping him--saving him? A bargain was
a bargain, and I was the last man to aid or abet any one in
wriggling out of a reasonable obligation. I wouldn't have lifted
a little finger to save Faust. But poor Soames!--doomed to pay
without respite an eternal price for nothing but a fruitless search
and a bitter disillusioning....

Odd and uncanny it seemed to me that he, Soames, in the flesh,
in the waterproof cape, was at this moment living in the last
decade of the next century, poring over books not yet written,
and seeing and seen by men not yet born. Uncannier and odder
still, that to-night and evermore he would be in Hell. Assuredly,
truth was stranger than fiction.

Endless that afternoon was. Almost I wished I had gone with
Soames--not indeed to stay in the reading-room, but to sally
forth for a brisk sight-seeing walk around a new London. I
wandered restlessly out of the Park I had sat in. Vainly I tried to