His friends all testify to his spirit, his normal view of life frequently making them forget the fact of his blindness. A distinguished writer and diplomat, who had known Fawcett, on being asked what impression had been produced on him, replied quickly and quite simply, ‘I think that he was an extraordinarily clear-sighted man.’ Stephen in his biography uses this sentence: ‘Fawcett had come to _see_ more distinctly the real tendency of the proposal and to feel the full force of the objections to which he had never been blind.’ Such remarks illustrate Fawcett’s power of making people utterly forget his blindness. [Sidenote: How to be happy.] He was always grateful when his companions paid no attention to his affliction, and would talk to him about the scenery which they passed and the people whom they met as if he too could see them. He kept his resolve to be as happy as was possible, and often said: ‘There is only one thing that I ever regret, and that is to have missed a chance for enjoyment.’ He told his friends that he intended to live to be ninety, and to relish every day of his life. He deliberately set about cultivating those tastes which would redound to his happiness: he taught himself to smoke, he patiently learned to listen to music, which had never unfolded its full joys to him before he had lost his sight. He so far succeeded as to be able to enjoy concerts and the opera. Doubtless, he systematically trained himself to remember. It was often remarked of him that if he had heard a voice once he would remember it again years after. One day in the Cambridge streets he was accosted by a Scottish professor. Fawcett could not remember him, but encouraged him to talk, and kept up his end of a long conversation. After a good twenty minutes, a trick in the Scot’s accent betrayed him, and Fawcett enthusiastically grasped his hand, and said, ‘How do you do, Clerk Maxwell?’ He never attempted to modify his vocabulary to fit his infirmity, and though the effect was at times strange he would greet people in the most natural way in the world with: ‘How do you do? how well you’re looking’; or ‘What’s the matter, you’re looking pale to-day? Too much work, eh?’ He commented on a friend’s looking old, and added: ‘But when men with that colour hair turn grey, they do look prematurely old.’ It was not unusual for him to mimic people, whom he had only known since his blindness, reproducing their gestures as well as their speech. [Sidenote: Games.]