He sent it, as it was, to an eminent firm of publishers, who, knowing Groome and his abilities, would have willingly taken it if they had seen their way to do so. But they could not, for the very reasons that had induced me to recast it, and they declined it. The book was then sent round to publisher after publisher with the same result; and yet there was more fine substance in this novel than in five ordinary stories. It was at last through the good offices of Mr. Coulson Kernahan that it was eventually taken by Messrs. Ward & Lock; and, although it won warm eulogies from such great writers as George Meredith, it never made its way. Its failure distressed me far more than it distressed Groome, for I loved the man, and knew what its success would have been to him. Amiable and charming as Groome was, there was in him a singular vein of dogged obstinacy after he had formed an opinion; and he not only refused to recast his story, but refused to abandon the absurd name of ‘Kriegspiel’ for a volume of romantic gipsy adventure. I suspect that a large proportion of people who asked for ‘Kriegspiel’ at Mudie’s and Smith’s consisted of officers who thought that it was a book on the German war game. I tried to persuade him to begin another gipsy novel, but found it quite impossible to do so. But even then I waited before bringing out my own prose story. I published instead my poem in which was told the story of Rhona Boswell, which, to my own surprise and Groome’s, had a success, notwithstanding its gipsy subject. Then I brought out my gipsy story, and accepted its success rather ungratefully, remembering how the greatest gipsy scholar in the world had failed in this line. In 1899 he published ‘Gypsy Folk-Tales,’ in which he got the aid of the first Romany scholar now living, Mr. John Sampson. And this was followed in 1901 by his edition of ‘Lavengro,’ which, notwithstanding certain unnecessary carpings at Borrow—such, for instance, as the assertion that the word “dook” is never used in Anglo-Romany for “ghost”—is beyond any doubt the best edition of the book ever published. The introduction gives sketches of all the Romany Ryes and students of Romany, from Andrew Boorde (_c._ 1490–1549) down to Mr. G. R. Sims and Mr. David MacRitchie. During this time it was becoming painfully perceptible to me that his physical powers were waning, although for two years that decadence seemed to have no effect upon his mental powers. But at last, while he was working on a book in which he took the deepest interest—the new edition of ‘Chambers’s Cyclopædia of English Literature’—it became manifest that the general physical depression was sapping the forces of the brain.