but he would not satisfy one’s curiosity.  “It’s only some nonsense of mine,” he would say.  He did not write many letters, and they were generally short.  At times he would be very busy on his farm, at times occupied in the village, at times he took long walks alone; very occasionally he went away for a day or two.  He was both uncommunicative and communicative.  He would often talk with the utmost frankness and abandon about his private affairs; but, on the other hand, I always had the sense of much that was hidden in his life.  And I have no doubt that he spent much time in prayer and meditation.  He seldom spoke of this, but it played a large part in his life.  He gave the impression of great ease, cheerfulness, and tranquillity, attained by some deliberate resolve, because he was both restless and sensitive, took sorrows and troubles hardly, and was deeply shocked and distressed by sad news of any kind.  I have heard him say that he often had great difficulty in forcing himself to open a letter which he thought likely to be distressing or unpleasant.  He was naturally, I imagine, of an almost neurotic tendency; but he did not seem so much to combat this by occupation and determination as to have arrived at some mechanical way of dealing with it.  I remember that he said to me once:  “If you have a bad business on hand, an unhappy or wounding affair, it is best to receive it fully and quietly.  Let it do its worst, realise it, take it in—­don’t resist it, don’t try to distract your mind:  see the full misery of it, don’t attempt to minimise it.  If you do that, you will suddenly find something within you come to your rescue and say, ‘Well, I can bear that!’ and then it is all right.  But if you try to dodge it, it’s my experience that there comes a kind of back-wash which hurts very much indeed.  Let the stream go over you, and then emerge.  To fight against it simply prolongs the agony.”  He certainly recovered himself quicker than anyone I have ever known:  indeed I think his recuperation was the best sign of his enormous vitality.  “I’m sensitive,” he said to me once, “but I’m tough—­I have a fearful power of forgetting—­it’s much better than forgiving.”  But the thing which remains most strongly in my mind about him is the way in which he pervaded the whole place.  It was fancy, perhaps, but I used to think I knew whether he was in the house or not.  Certainly, if I wanted to speak to him, I used to go off to his study on occasions, quite sure that I should find him; while on other occasions—­and I more than once put this to the test—­I have thought to myself, “It’s no use going—­the Father is out.”  His presence at any sort of gathering was entirely unmistakable.  It was not that you felt hampered or controlled:  it was more like the flowing of some clear stream.  When he was away, the thing seemed tame and spiritless; when he was there, it was all full of life.  But his presence was not, at least to me, at all wearisome or straining.  I have known men of great vitality