me now the only thing worth doing in the world," he says in one of his
letters when he was deep in a book. Then he flung himself into gardening
and handicraft, back again to his writings, or his correspondence, and
again to his prayers.

But it is impossible to select one of his moods, and to say that his
true life lay there. His life lay in all of them. If work was tedious to
him, he comforted himself with the thought that it would soon be done.
He was an excellent man of affairs, never "slothful in business," but
with great practical ability. He made careful bargains for his books,
and looked after his financial interests tenaciously and diligently,
with a definite purpose always in his mind. He lived, I am sure, always
looking forward and anticipating. I do not believe he dwelt at all upon
the past. It was life in which he was interested. As I walked with my
mother about the beautiful garden, after his funeral, I said to her: "It
seems almost too pathetic to be borne that Hugh should just have
completed all this." "Yes," she said, "but I am sure we ought to think
only that it meant to him seven years of very great happiness." That was
perfectly true! If he had been called upon to leave Hare Street to take
up some important work elsewhere, he would certainly not have dwelt on
the pathetic side of it himself. He would have had a pang, as when he
kissed the doorposts of his room at Mirfield on departing. But he would
have gone forward, and he would have thought of it no more. He had a
supreme power of casting things behind him, and he was far too intent on
the present to have indulged in sentimental reveries of what had been.

It is clear to me, from what the doctors said after his death, that if
the pneumonia which supervened upon great exhaustion had been averted,
he would have had to give up much of his work for a long time, and
devote himself to rest and deliberate idleness. I cannot conceive how he