He read that teaching into the happier London which greeted him, after an absence of more than twenty-five years.  At last, the museums and art galleries were really open to the people, who thronged them, drinking in knowledge.  He noted the children playing in the parks, and they were better dressed, the parks themselves better kept.  You can judge a nation by the state of its children’s boots, and these had fewer holes.  The poor London had, and ever would have, but she was not the callous mother of other years.  She felt for those who were down.

Sir George would ride by ’bus, except, indeed, when in pursuit of some volume for that beloved library at Auckland.  Then, nothing would satisfy his eagerness but hot foot and back with the trophy, scanning its pages in his scholar’s joy.  But a-top the ’bus was the working man, homeward bound, and he was getting more out of life.  Manhood was in him, he evidently had at last a free, firm seat in the saddle of which Providence had always held the stirrup.

The feeling of human brotherhood was wider, deeper, the benefits springing therefrom apparent all round.  Penny fares were bringing classes into contact with each other, who were formerly as far divided as if they had lived in different planets.  The London policeman’s upheld hand, was an eloquent speech on the sacred meaning of law to a free people.  Youth helped age to a seat in a public vehicle, and the bricklayer quenched the fire of his pipe because the smoke annoyed a lady sitting behind him.

Sir George would have built a bricklayer’s statue on the best site that London could provide.  Not that he was fond of statues, unless they happened likewise to be art; but that such a one would have carried its meaning.  There was already a statue of himself at Cape Town, and his Auckland admirers had a scheme for another.

‘No doubt they’ll take care it does you justice,’ he was joked.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ he answered, a smile puckering his face, ’but perhaps they should wait until I’m gone.  They might want to pull it down again, if I did not behave all right.  Now, that would hurt my feelings.’

III YOUTH THE BIOGRAPHER

One to whom the beyond is near, who has the kindled vision, probably best sees the life he has lived, in the beginnings—­child, boy, and youth.  There are no smudges on that mirror.

The stage of being which we call childhood had an endless charm for Sir George Grey, and often that drew him back to his own early years.  The little child, a bundle of prattling innocence, still on the banks of the world’s highway, like a daisy nodding into the flying stream, was in his sight almost a divinity.  Here was the most beautiful, the most perfect manifestation of the Creator; an atmosphere where the wisest felt themselves the babes.

‘You are the one Englishman living,’ Olive Schreiner, when in England, wrote to Sir George before calling upon him, ’of whom I should like to say that I had shaken his hand.’