I continued these visits, always short, till very near the close; for whether merely from the perfect courtesy which was a part of his nature, or whether because such interruptions of the long morning hours were really welcome to him, he never allowed me to leave him without bidding me come again.
I remember him asking me after my mother at one of the latest of these visits.

I told him that she was fairly well, was not suffering, but that she was becoming very deaf.

"Dead, is she ?" he cried, for he had heard me imperfectly, "I wish I was! I can't sleep," he added, "but I very soon shall, soundly too, and all the twenty-four hours round." I used often to find him reading one of the novels of his old friend G.P.R.James, and he hardly ever failed to remark that he was a "woonderful" writer; for so he pronounced the word, which was rather a favourite one with him.
It was a singular thing that Landor always dropped his aspirates.

He was, I think, the only man in his position in life whom I ever heard do so.

That a man who was not only by birth a gentleman, but was by genius and culture--and such culture!--very much more, should do this, seemed to me an incomprehensible thing.