I was fortunate in securing several very beautiful contributions from his pen, some of which gained an added interest from the delightful illustrations of Mr. Alfred Parsons, who found himself in full sympathy with Jefferies’s purposes and design. At a later date Jefferies was associated in the same way with my friend Mr. North, whose delicate drawings showed a quick sympathy with the mood of the writer; and I know that Jefferies highly appreciated the gentle hospitality which Mr. North afforded him in the later days of his declining health. Another figure which comes back to me among the vivid memories of those editorial days is that of Mr. Lawrence Oliphant--surely one of the strangest, most gifted, and fascinating characters of the time in which his chequered career was passed. No one who met Oliphant could be insensible to his charms, and yet, as one sat in the man’s presence, it was always with a feeling of wonder and amazement at the many vicissitudes of his life. I knew him personally only towards the close of his career, when he offered to me for publication a series of articles on “The Lake of Tiberias,” which were to be illustrated by his wife. This was during one of his brief visits to England from the Holy Land, where he had made his home, and he would sometimes lunch with me at the Garrick Club, holding me enthralled, while the passing hours sped by unnoticed, as he unfolded his views of life, drawn from the deep fund of a rich experience won in many changing occupations. Brilliant and witty, earnest and often eloquent in his most serious moods, there was scarcely more than a hint in his conversation of those shifting impulses, now so passionately held and again so swiftly abandoned, that had made of his career something of a wonder to the world. Unhappily the task which he and his wife had jointly undertaken for the Magazine, led to her untimely death, from sudden fever, upon the very shores of the lake where she was engaged upon the illustrations for his article. One of the things which gave me most pleasure in my record as an editor was the encouragement that I was enabled to afford to that gifted young draughtsman Hugh Thomson, on the threshold of his career. I remember very well the day he first entered my office. He was wholly unknown to me, and without any introduction save that which he presented himself in the form of a number of drawings enclosed in a portfolio that he bore in his hand. With the face of a mere boy, and most emphatically an Irish boy, it seemed to me, as I looked at him, scarcely possible that the drawings that he showed me were from his own hand. They comprised, I remember, a series of illustrations to _Vanity Fair_, and despite the confessed immaturity of their execution, they exhibited, as I thought, such fineness of perception, and such an intuitive sense of humour, that I was at once anxious to learn from him what he had already published.