Page:Stories after Nature.pdf/20

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
xvi
PREFACE.

unsealing the room that he might look upon their remains.

Once I saw Wells. He was for a few days in London, and came to see me at Woodford, on Hainault Forest edge, where I then lived. There were two coaches to Woodford for the eight miles from town. By the first, one Sunday morning, came David Scott, the great Scottish painter, the brother of my life-long friend William Bell Scott, so lately dead; by the second came an unexpected visitor, a stranger, a small weather-worn, wiry man, looking like a sportsman or fox-hunter. This was Charles Wells. He had been a great sportsman during a residence of many years in the north of France. The two men spent the day with me, a notable day for me with two such guests, both so remarkable, and so widely unlike. I think I heard some years after that of Wells having joined the Romanist Church and being spoken of as a mesmerist or some sort of miracle performer; and then of his going to live with a