'Well, I don't know,' he answered, a smile puckering his face, 'but
perhaps they should wait until I'm gone. They might want to pull it down
again, if I did not behave all right. Now, that would hurt my feelings.'




III YOUTH THE BIOGRAPHER


One to whom the beyond is near, who has the kindled vision, probably best
sees the life he has lived, in the beginnings--child, boy, and youth.
There are no smudges on that mirror.

The stage of being which we call childhood had an endless charm for Sir
George Grey, and often that drew him back to his own early years. The
little child, a bundle of prattling innocence, still on the banks of the
world's highway, like a daisy nodding into the flying stream, was in his
sight almost a divinity. Here was the most beautiful, the most perfect
manifestation of the Creator; an atmosphere where the wisest felt
themselves the babes.

'You are the one Englishman living,' Olive Schreiner, when in England,
wrote to Sir George before calling upon him, 'of whom I should like to
say that I had shaken his hand.'

But it would not, she continued, be the first time they had met, for,
during his rule of Cape Colony, he had visited the mission station where
her parents dwelt. She thought this was while Prince Alfred was on his