My cousin took no pains to soften the language with which he addressed “the insolent brute” before he was half-way across the lawn, and Joe hastened as he saw the big man step defiantly out of the boat while the woman wept and implored him unavailingly to return. Joe caught my cousin by the arm--he was getting on in years--for as he drew near he saw that the intruder was an actor--of no great refinement--known in the profession for a swaggering bully. “There’s a lady in the boat, Mr. Vansittart,” said my husband. Instantly my cousin stopped, and the man, recognising Joe, greeted him surlily and presently turned back to his companion now fainting on the bank. Joe followed him, and George Vansittart, returning to the house, called out to his butler, who was hastening to the scene: “Take out some brandy and water for the lady and see she needs nothing.” Joe brought back a message of thanks from the poor thing, and was far too anxious lest the outbreak should affect my cousin’s health to mind his remark that he was to be congratulated upon his acquaintance. Recurring to that appreciation of him by the young in his last years, which is one of the sweetest tributes to Joe’s memory, many alert and boyish faces rise up before me; eager over some animated discussion in which the give-and-take was always even between the older man and the younger, or alight with laughter at his quaint wit and merry censure of some foible of the day; for though he could laugh at its foibles he was never out of heart with the world, which was always to him a good world, even when he prophesied that, through _some_ crucible, the crazes of the last twenty years would have to pass for elimination. “They have got to have this epidemic,” he would say of Cubist painter and eccentric poet, “but they’ll get over it, and meanwhile the good old world will go on quietly as usual and young folk will fall in love and want poets to sing for them and so the best things must come to the top in the end.” Apart from this sort of, as he called it, “half-baked” thought, he was always ready to weigh and consider every new aspect of life; and if no passing mode could deceive him or put him out of heart, either with his life-long heroes or with his own methods of expression; yet to the last hour he was always keen--not only for fresh work himself, but to see the work of the world develop. In the words of Mr. Stopford Brooke, quoted in the _Life_ by Prof. L. P. Jacks, he would have said: “Whether in this world or another we will pursue, we will overtake, we will divide the spoil.” And so, whether he were hanging over the garden gate of our holiday home gathering information from the labourers who passed along the road, or discussing ethical problems with his sons and their friends, he was always “pursuing”--and the young were always at home with him, for he never wanted to lead only to express his opinion and listen to their reply.