All are agreed on the sense of the terrific latent energy with which that quiet country-house was stored: there was high tension in its tranquillity. You felt that if you touched anything a great electric spark might flare with a cracking explosion towards your extended finger.... I got there during the morning and was at once taken to see Mr. Gladstone. He was in his study, sitting at his “political” table: that other table was the table where he worked at Homer, so he presently explained to me, suggesting though not actually stating the image which flew into my mind, of his boiling over, so to speak, at the political table, that furnace of fierce contention and white-hot enthusiasm, and of his putting himself to cool off from controversy by the Ionian Sea. He instantly plunged into the subject of Roman legionaries in Britain as if nothing else really mattered or ever had mattered to him, and pored over the copies of a few inscriptions I had brought him. But he wanted more lively evidence than a mere copy. “I should like to see the squeezes of these,” he said. “Do you know the only proper way to make squeezes? You take your sheet of blotting-paper, and after you have washed the stone, you lay it on, pressing the paper into the letters of the inscription. Then sprinkle it with water, but by no means wet your paper before you have laid it on the stone, because it is apt to tear if you do that. Then take a clothes brush--not too stiff a one--and tap the surface over and over again with the bristles. By degrees you will get the paper to mould itself into all the letters of the inscription, and where there are letters apparently quite perished, it will often show you some faint stroke from which you can conjecture what the missing letter has been, though it is invisible to the eye. And let your blotting paper get dry before you remove it. Otherwise again you may tear it. Yes, we are coming to lunch: we know,” he said to Mrs. Gladstone, who came in for the second time to say it was ready. I do not of course pretend to reproduce the precise wording of this little dissertation on blotting-paper-squeezes, but there or thereabouts was the substance of it, [Illustration: E. F. BENSON, ÆT. 22 [Page 269] full of detail, full of fire and gesticulation, as if he himself had invented the science of squeezes, and had done nothing all his life but make them.