GEORGE MOORE
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that the house was going to be burnt, I wrote to Tom Ruttledge to have the portrait packed up and sent to me, and the very night it arrived a band of incendiaries came to my steward's house and demanded the keys.
Freeman: The manuscript of the French Revolution was not saved?
Moore: No; everything was lost except this portrait, and I rue the accident that saved it, for I can no longer go up or down stairs without remembering a long past, more real to me than the present moment—the recollections of certain rooms, my grandfather's library, with the old gentleman's portrait over the chimney-piece, the wire-netted bookcases, the round table, the telescope, the view of the lake winding sadly mile after mile by low wooded shores, and my disappointment when I returned the last volume of Middlemarch to its place on the shelves. My memories of Adam Bede are more explicit. I can still hear, almost hear some of the young squire's words in the scene in which the parson tries to dissuade him—from what, I have forgotten; probably from walking out with Hetty—and I can recall how the story lost its humanity for me when the dairymaid was taken by the police and tried for the murder of her child. The story of a crime is never a good story. Some years ago I read The Mill on the Floss, a well-modulated narrative, with the aunts of Maggie Tulliver, each in her house, and her habits, and Maggie Tulliver going to meet a cripple or a hunchback in a pine wood. A delightful, intellectual companionship this was, one that George Eliot's readers thought should continue and end in marriage; but George Eliot knew better than her readers how life is made, and she chose that Maggie's bodily instincts should be awakened by a commonplace young man, who takes her away somewhere in a boat or a barge, I have forgotten which. I was delighted when the young man seized Maggie's bare arm and kissed it, a very natural act, one which a girl would expect who was eloping with a young man, and disappointed when, despite the young man's apologies, tears, and promises of amendment, Maggie returns home.
Freeman: You remember the flood, with Maggie and Tom Tulliver in a boat?
Moore: Yes; and I have nothing to say against the end; it's harmless, it's almost good. But I am thinking now of the passing of
