Fawcett was surprised and amused at the way in which his essay was received with unanimous approval, and said that it showed ‘the uncertainty of any forecast of the effect of an appeal to the public.’ After years of labour apparently productive of little result, he had suddenly become an exponent of accepted principles. He is now the great man. And a great man’s jokes, however feeble, make their impress. But through this atmosphere we see the cheerful Fawcett of our ken, gay, brusque, and light-hearted. He walks with a friend from Newmarket to Cambridge. The friend relates: [Sidenote: Fawcett and the Yokels.] ‘We stopped at a roadside inn for lunch; the country yokels stared, as well they might, at this strong-faced blind man, full of interest for the things they knew about. He insisted on paying more than the landlady asked, because he had taken all the crust off the loaf! ‘I saw some one on the road whom I thought Fawcett ought to know, who passed with no sign of recognition. On inquiry from him why I thought he would know this man, I described him as some old fogey who looked like a member of the University. Later on I had occasion to talk to him about the strenuous exercise he often took, and hazarded a conjecture that he was as strong as any member of the House of Commons. His version, shouted out to his wife directly he got inside of his house, was that I had been calling him an old fogey, and had been trying to make up for it by calling him the strongest member of the House.’ ‘In the evening his wife or any friend present read aloud to him. I remember one evening, after I had been reading the _Spectator_ to him, Mrs. Fawcett took up Trevelyan’s _Life of Fox_, and read to him for some minutes; she then looked up and said, ‘Harry, you are asleep!’ He indignantly denied it, and to show that he had not been asleep said, “I have heard every word you said. I think we will have some of Fox’s Life now.” When informed that we had been reading it for ten minutes, he said, without being at all disconcerted, “Oh, have you, then go on!”’ [Sidenote: The terrible Turks.] The Beaconsfield Government (for Disraeli was now Earl of Beaconsfield), which had begun its course so prosperously, had from 1876 onwards to meet difficulties arising from war in Eastern Europe. The Turks put down a rising in Bulgaria with inconceivable barbarity, and Beaconsfield’s handling of the question gave great offence to many Englishmen. The sufferings of the Christians brought Gladstone out of his retirement and, in the first days of September, he published a pamphlet that was sold daily in its thousands. Within a fortnight Fawcett presided at a great meeting in Exeter Hall, the birthplace of so many crusades.