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presented myself at the hour appointed. Newton's 

 rooms have been described by Mr. Benson in his 

 "Leaves of the Tree," and I think he does them 

 considerable injustice. For him they were the last cry 

 of the mid- Victorian epoch, of a type calculated to 

 make the strongest aesthete shudder. I am rather 

 abnormally affected by my surroundings, but I never 

 experienced in them any such feelings of artistic malaise. 

 Books, to my thinking, are the most seemly of all wall 

 adornments, and with books the walls of Newton's 

 sitting-room (for in those days he had but one) were 

 almost entirely covered, and, I might add, the chairs 

 and sofa also. There was, it is true, but little in the 

 way of decoration, but what there was was good. 

 Immediately over the door by which one entered hung 

 a magnificent pair of reindeer horns the spoils, I 

 fancy, of his Lapp journey, and facing the wide French 

 window was a beautiful watercolour of an Iceland 

 Falcon by Joseph Wolf (the one man, as Newton used 

 always to say, who could draw the birds of prey). 

 Another, or rather a colour print, by the same hand, 

 hung over the mantelpiece, and in later days a 

 Japanese kakemono by a celebrated artist, representing 

 a skein of geese dropping down to the water, occupied 

 the only book-free space on the window side. 



Newton's manner with unfledged youth was very 

 kindly and reassuring. He talked to them as equals, 

 which seemed strange to us in those days when the 

 gulf between don and undergraduate was of unfathom- 

 able depth, and soon made them feel as much at their 

 ease as was possible in the early 'seventies. We sat 

 rather close together, the room being small, and I 

 remember being rather astonished (so different were 

 things then) at the presence of tobacco and spirits, the 

 latter, of course, being in the form of brandy, for 

 whiskey was at that time a fluid almost unknown to the 

 southron, though I had made its acquaintance in the 

 Orkneys. Strangely enough, I can recall but few of 

 the early habitues of Newton's salon. There was E. 



