“Went up to have tea with old John Loder, and said a cunningly veiled Good-bye to him.  I doubt if I shall see him again, the dear old man.  I think he felt so, too, for when he came to the door with me, instead of his usual remark about ‘Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest,’ he said, ‘Farewell to thee’ in a more sober manner than his wont—­and I left with an armful of books which he had given me ’to keep me out of mischief.’  We had a good talk after tea—­he told me about the adventures of his brothers, one of whom went out to New Zealand.  He uses the most delightful brisk phrases in his talk, smiling away to himself and wrinkling up his forehead, which can only be distinguished from his smooth bald pate by its charming corrugation of parallel furrows.  He took me into his den while he rummaged through his books to find some which would be acceptable to me—­’May as well give ’em away before it’s too late, ye know’—­and then he settled back in his easy chair to puff at a pipe.  I must note down one of his phrases which tickled me—­he has such a knack for the proverbial and the epigrammatic.  ’He’s cut his cloth, he can wear his breeches,’ he said of a certain scapegrace.  He chuckled over the Suffolk phrase ‘a chance child,’ for a bastard (alluding to one such of his acquaintance in old days).  He constantly speaks of things he wants to do ’before I tarn my toes up to the daisies.’  He told me old tales of Woodbridge in the time of the Napoleonic wars when there was a garrison of 5,000 soldiers quartered here—­this was one of the regions in which an attack by Boney was greatly feared.  He says that the Suffolk phrase ‘rafty weather’ (meaning mist or fog) originates from that time, as being weather suitable for the French to make a surprise attack by rafts or flat-boats.

“He chuckled over the reminiscence that he was once a great hand at writing obituary notices for the local paper.  ’Weep, weep for him who cried for us,’ was the first line of his epitaph upon a former Woodbridge town crier!  I was thinking that it would be hard to do him justice when the time comes to write his.  May he have a swift and painless end such as his genial spirit deserves, and not linger on into a twilight life with failing senses.  When his memory and his pipe and his books begin to fail him, when those keen old eyes grow dim and he can no longer go to sniff the salt air on the river-wall—­then may the quick and quiet ferryman take dear old John Loder to the shadow land.”

A VENTURE IN MYSTICISM

I had heard so much about this Rabbi Tagore and his message of calm for our hustling, feverish life, that I thought I would try to put some of that stuff into practice.