Meantime I may mention a quaint bit of palmistry or thought-reading connected with him. We had a friend, Augusta Webb of Newstead, now Mrs. Fraser, who was an expert in this line. She was calling on me one day when I mentioned casually that I had met Mr. Arnold, whose _Light of Asia_ she greatly admired. She expressed a great wish to meet him, so I said, "He is coming to dine this evening--you had better come also." She accepted with enthusiasm. He sat next to me, and to please her I put her on his other side. In the course of dinner something was said about favourite flowers, and I exclaimed, "Augusta, tell Mr. Arnold his favourite flower." She looked at his hand and said without hesitation, "I don't know its name, but I think it is a white flower rather like a rose and with a very strong scent." He remarked, astonished, "I wish I had written it down beforehand to show how right you are. It is an Indian flower." (I forget the name, which he said he had mentioned in _The Light of Asia_), "white and strong-smelling and something like a tuberose." It is impossible that Augusta could have known beforehand. Her sister told me later that she did occasionally perceive a person's thought and that this was one of the instances. To return to Thomas Hughes, who originally gave me Lowell's poems. He was an enthusiast and most conscientious. On the occasion when, as I said before, he stayed at Middleton he promised to tell my boy Villiers--then six and a half years old--a story. Having been prevented from doing so, he sent the story by post, carefully written out with this charming letter: "_February 1st, 1880._ "MY DEAR LITTLE MAN, "I was quite sorry this morning when you said to me, as we were going away, 'Ah, but you have never told me about the King of the Cats, as you promised.' I was always taught when I was a little fellow, smaller than you, that I must never 'run word,' even if it cost me my knife with three blades and a tweezer, or my ivory dog-whistle, which were the two most precious things I had in the world. And my father and mother not only told me that I must never 'run word,' for they knew that boys are apt to forget what they are only told, but they never 'ran word' with me, which was a much surer way to fix what they told me in my head; because boys find it hard to forget what they see the old folk that they love do day by day.