He loved to be read to, and he kept a separate book for each friend who entertained him in this fashion. One day _The Rhyme of the Duchess May_ was being read to him. In each stanza of the poem recurs the phrase ‘Toll slowly.’ The whole thing was admirably read—with pathetic emphasis on the refrain. One of the audience says: ‘We all thought that Fawcett was asleep, but to our amusement, when the reader had finished, he said enthusiastically, with his generous voice, “Thank you very much; beautifully read, but don’t you think that you might have left out that ‘told slowly’?” [Illustration: HENRY FAWCETT AND HIS FATHER] [Sidenote: Salisbury Close.] He continued a frequent visitor at Salisbury, and always fitted in with the home ways. His parents had come to pass their closing year in a house in the Cathedral Close. Opposite the house there was a stretch of old wall, where before breakfast Fawcett used to walk quite by himself, enjoying a seclusion and peace such as was his in the court of his old Cambridge College. The gates of the close are shut at eleven o’clock every night. Miss Fawcett tells the following: ‘As Henry liked to walk the last thing at night before going to bed, and as it was not always convenient for one of us to accompany him, we arranged for him to go with the gate closer on his rounds. So regularly, when Harry was at home, the gate closer’s voice would be heard at half-past ten, “I’ve come for Mr. Harry,” and together they would sally forth and lock the ancient gates about the close.’ The scheme worked admirably to the entire satisfaction of Fawcett, and to the delight of the watchman, who, like the rest of the world, found Fawcett a stimulating and cheering companion. He awakened the seeing man’s interest in the beauty of the cathedral which they passed in their nightly patrol, and often asked if a different planet had yet appeared on the horizon, if the moon could be seen over the church tower, or if the clouds were obscuring the stars. [Sidenote: The New Forest in peril.] Though he had passed his childhood on the edge of the New Forest, it is doubtful if Fawcett ever saw its beauties excepting with his mind’s eye and by the help of his friends’ description. In the seventies he was fond of going there and combining the comfort and joy that he always found in his walk by the great trees with a fishing expedition at Ibbesley. Here he liked to stay with his fisher friend Tizard and his good wife, sharing their homely meals and chat; the place abounded in birds whose singing delighted him. It was here that he caught the huge salmon that graced the table at his father’s and mother’s golden wedding feast.