At Cortina, too, I saw again Gladstone, late in the summer, when the place was abandoned by the general crowd.  I had begun a study of running water, over which I lingered as long as the weather permitted, when he came with Mrs. Gladstone and his son Herbert and daughter Helen.  The old man was full of physical and mental energy, and we had several moderate climbs in the mountains of the vicinity.  They had not come out to be together as at home, and each took generally a different walk.  Gladstone was a good walker, and talked by the way,—­which not all good walkers can do,—­but I do not remember his ever talking of himself; and in this he was like Ruskin,—­he assumed himself as an element in the situation, and thought no more about it; never in our conversations obtruding his views as of more importance than the conversation demanded, and never opinionated, not even dogmatic, but always inquiring, and more desirous of hearing of the things that had interested him than of expressing his own views about them.  It was a moment in which, for some reason I do not now recall, Beaconsfield was much in evidence, and we discussed him on one of our walks; on his part with the most dispassionate appreciation and kindness of manner.  I had said of his great rival that he had struck a blow at the prestige of the English aristocracy, from which it would never recover, and he asked with a quickened interest what that might be, and when I replied that it was by his putting himself at the head of it, he thought a moment and replied, nodding his head, “That is true.”

He was very fond of talking with the people of the valley, who are Italians, and his Italian was better than one is accustomed to hear from English people, even from those who live in Italy.  We passed a fountain one day, at which a washerwoman was washing her linen, and he stopped to talk to her, and asked her, among other questions, if she had always been a washerwoman.  No, she replied, she had been a bália (nurse) once.  He was struck by her pronunciation of the word bália and walked on; but presently he said, “I thought that that word was pronounced balía” and, when I explained that there were two words—­bália which meant a nurse, and balía, which came from the same root as our “bailiff,” and meant a charge, custody,—­he seemed annoyed, and made no more remarks during the continuation of our climb.  It was evident that he was vexed, not at me, who corrected him, but at his not having known the trivial detail of a language efficiency in which he prided himself on.  It was the only foible I detected in him.  He was very much interested in America, and asked many questions about our politics.  Two things, he said, in the future of America, seemed to him ominous of evil:  the condition of our civil service, and the amount of our Western lands going into mortmain through the gifts to the great railway systems.