A few months later Lord Wolseley handed over the Command-in-Chief to Lord Roberts, and he presently retired to a farmhouse at Glynde, near Lewes, where he resided for a number of years, more and more secluded from the world, but devoted to his garden and his books. Once more he became a voracious reader of miscellaneous literature. Here he liked to be informed of what was going on in the world of letters, and to see as frequently as he could a few friends who wrote. Among these, I think there was none whom he valued more than Henry James, a very old friend, earlier, I think, than Andrew Lang or myself. It might be supposed that there was little in common between the active soldier and the exquisite and meticulous dreamer, but, on the contrary, their mutual esteem was persistent, and Wolseley delighted in the conversation of Henry James, although he sometimes allowed himself to smile at the novelist's halting and deliberate utterance. Wolseley, on the other hand, was an emphatic, spontaneous talker, not very particular in selecting the very best word or in rounding the most harmonious period. It was amusing to hear them together, the one so short and sharp, the other so mellifluous and hesitating, yet their admiration, each for the other, was continuous. I do not think that Wolseley was ever more happy than in the first years of his residence at Glynde, the world forgetting, by the world forgot. But a certain insidious melancholy soon began to invade him. He gradually cut himself off from all his round of London engagements, and he never once, if I remember right, attended the House of Lords after his retirement from the War Office. He was not in the least degree invalided or deprived of nervous energy, but he felt that in the long, strenuous years of service he had earned a holiday, and now he took it. He made, perhaps, few new friends, but he was careful to cultivate the old ones, and no one was ever more assiduous in the art of friendship. He clung to old associations and to old faces--"they can't escape me," I remember his saying. He liked to see them at Glynde, where they always received a glowing, almost a boisterous, welcome. The house lies in a sort of glen between two ranges of the beautiful Sussex downs, and Wolseley loved to climb these eminences with a familiar companion. He was particularly apt to take such a friend eastward along the lanes to Firle and then up to the summit of the beacon above Alciston. This was one of his favourite afternoon excursions, and from this vantage he would sweep the coastline from Seaford to Pevensey, and dilate on its strategic capabilities.