Ewing, when we
butterflies were gone, were laboriously ardent. Many thoughts that
occupied the later years of my friend were caught from the small
utterance of that toy. Thence came his inquiries into the roots of
articulate language and the foundations of literary art; his papers
on vowel sounds, his papers in the SATURDAY REVIEW upon the laws of
verse, and many a strange approximation, many a just note, thrown
out in talk and now forgotten. I pass over dozens of his
interests, and dwell on this trifling matter of the phonograph,
because it seems to me that it depicts the man. So, for Fleeming,
one thing joined into another, the greater with the less. He cared
not where it was he scratched the surface of the ultimate mystery -
in the child's toy, in the great tragedy, in the laws of the
tempest, or in the properties of energy or mass - certain that
whatever he touched, it was a part of life - and however he touched
it, there would flow for his happy constitution interest and
delight.
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