An Irish servant once said of him: “Sure, now, he does like to see the young people have a good time!” and it expressed brilliantly his attitude. For to his mind, apparently all people were young people whom he was watching at their diversions. In fact, if it had not been for his hilarious sharing of our pleasures, he would have been to us rather like a god: for he seemed older than we, as though he had known of old the great lives upon Olympus and were down here to gratify some fatherly instinct of sympathy for us. And when he sometimes left us, one sensed the withdrawal of considerably more than a presence. We were accustomed to him as one of the most active figures on the scene, but still, when he went away, it was as if a harmonious background had also been removed. In appearance he was fat. His head was large and his face grave, in repose, like that of a serious child. There were stories, I was once shocked on finding out, about the Great Pan Jandrum’s youth--stories of a vagueness that implied things about him quite incongruous to the people who knew him now. Did he then have a common youth, with all its attendant distortions?--it seemed impossible. Evidently it had not been a romantic theatrical youth either, in spite of its present shaded character. One lady simply said he had been “nasty” and let it go at that. He seems to have been a commonplace person then--aggressively commonplace, with all the nauseating poses of his age strong in him, like diseases. Alcohol had played a part, it seems; and he was not one of those who were made genial or attractive by its use. One could have the heresy to make a decent guess, after all this, as to one origin of his widespread tolerance. But the placidity of his middle years had been of an amplitude to swallow and almost entirely submerge these indefinite and hushed enormities. So if any dignity in him had given it a chance, the community, which was not large, would have looked upon him as a benevolent influence. At a feast, without his contagious humor, he would still have been a sort of golden aura to the occasion; to meet him was to come away eased of the life-long burden of yourself, having heard him laugh; and he had a gift for rendering people unable to look seriously in the face of a calamity. You were always trying, in spite of yourself, to worship him, he was so grand, and so you would have, except that he was too dynamic for a pedestal.