I do not know whether the picture is all I fancy it to be, or whether my imagination, fired by its likeness to myself, gives it its atmosphere, but to me it is extraordinarily suggestive. Whenever I look upon it the life of this exquisite passes through my brain like a painted procession. He was obviously one of those born to the worship of beautiful apparitions, and his life had been passed at the extremes of joy and bitterness which that apparently exoteric, but in reality deeply esoteric, cult involves. It was a face that could never have known the lethargy of mediocrity. When his spirit slumbered it must have been the sleep of satiety. I am glad I never saw a picture of him in old age. That face, stained with the vices of an intoxicating youth and torn by the humiliation and agonies of middle and old age, could not have been pleasant. I am convinced that there were no looking-glasses in that solitary tower where he and his mysterious friend died and were only found when the rats had half eaten them. But to me the great point was that he was impatient of dullness, and had stretched out his hand to take what he wanted. The guide-book said he was without natural affection. How little the world understands men! As if an egotist of character might not slay the mother he loved for a dear purpose. Morally, Ethel, Earl Gascoyne, was a matricide, the family chronicles deponing that his mother had died of grief at his crimes. He could not have been entirely destitute of natural affection, for he was apparently overwhelmed with sorrow at her death, as the inscription on the stately tomb which he erected to her memory in Hammerton chapel indicated. I wandered after the gaping, chattering group hardly hearing what was said. How was it that I was so like this Gascoyne who was so singularly unlike his kinsmen, and who had put into practice the dreams I had dreamt? He had been right. Hammerton had been worth risking something for. We visited the lonely tower where he was supposed to have spent the haunted evening of his days in searching for the elixir of life, and where the rats had left him a hideous, obscene corpse. The trippers seemed infected by the gloom of the story, for in silence they tramped through the spacious, echoing, upper chamber, where he was reputed to have studied the stars, and to have sold himself to the Evil One. This old man who found it so difficult to die—he was nearly a hundred when the end came—spent his last years in a debauch of mystical speculation, remaining interesting to the end.