I had before invited Mr. Grey to visit me in St. Louis, for his seeming helplessness appealed to me from the first.  He had met some hard rebuffs in his American contacts.  I thought I might aid him in making his way.  Returning in the autumn to my home, I heard from Mr. Grey that he was coming to be my guest, and in due time he arrived.  I missed him at the station, but he presently appeared at our door in an express-waggon, sitting on the seat with the driver, in the midst of his belongings.  He spent a week with us in the first American home he had known, and we found him an amiable and unobtrusive gentleman.  He was a vigorous walker and explored the city well.  His listless, seemingly inattentive eyes somehow scanned everything, and he judged well what he witnessed.  He was an accomplished scholar and had a quiet humour.  A little daughter half-playfully and half-wilfully, announced her intention to follow her own pleasure in a certain case.  “Milicent is a Hedonist,” said the guest, and the Oxford scholar brought Aristippus and Epicurus into odd conjunction with a Mississippi Valley breakfast-table.  He laid aside his white woollen suit, but his attire remained unconventional, not to say outre.  Even the wrinkled dress-suit in which he appeared at dinner, I think was the achievement of a tailor in the island of Barbadoes.  His opera-hat was a wonder.  He was, or was soon to be, a belted earl, but his belt only appeared on his pajamas, raiment of which I heard then for the first time.  It had early appeared in our intercourse that the main interest of Mr. Grey lay in humane and religious work.  He also was a devoted member of the Church of England.  On Sunday morning we started early for the leading Episcopal Church but on the way he inquired as to the place of worship of the negro congregation of that faith.  I confessed my ignorance of it, but he had in some way ascertained it, and I presently found myself following his lead down a rather squalid street where at last we came to the humble temple.  Instead of hearing the bishop, a famous and eloquent man, he preferred to sit on a bare bench in the obscure little meeting-house, where he fraternised cordially with the dusky company we found there.  He was more interested in our charities than in our politics and business, and in his quiet way during the week learned the story well.  I introduced him to Southern friends who gave him letters to persons in the South.  Provided with these he bade us good-bye at last, and went far and wide through what had been the Confederacy.  He visited Jefferson Davis and many soldiers and politicians of note, getting at first-hand their point of view.  I also gave him letters to some eminent men in the East, which he presented, meeting with a good reception.  He made a wide and shrewd study of the United States, and I am glad to think I helped him.  When I met him he was unfriended and without credentials, and his singularities were exposing him to some inconvenient jostling in our rough world.  I opened some doors to him through which he pushed his way into much that was best worth seeing in American life.  An old friend, a radical man of letters, wrote me afterwards that he enjoyed Mr. Grey, and he thought Mr. Grey enjoyed him although he believed that if he had been a pauper, a criminal, or even a bishop, Mr. Grey would have enjoyed him much more.