In another Manchester family, whose name will be familiar to my readers—that of the Gaskells, Fleeming was a frequent visitor. To Mrs. Gaskell, he would often bring his new ideas, a process that many of his later friends will understand and, in their own cases, remember. With the girls, he had ‘constant fierce wrangles,’ forcing them to reason out their thoughts and to explain their prepossessions; and I hear from Miss Gaskell that they used to wonder how he could throw all the ardour of his character into the smallest matters, and to admire his unselfish devotion to his parents. Of one of these wrangles, I have found a record most characteristic of the man. Fleeming had been laying down his doctrine that the end justifies the means, and that it is quite right ‘to boast of your six men-servants to a burglar or to steal a knife to prevent a murder’; and the Miss Gaskells, with girlish loyalty to what is current, had rejected the heresy with indignation. From such passages-at-arms, many retire mortified and ruffled; but Fleeming had no sooner left the house than he fell into delighted admiration of the spirit of his adversaries. From that it was but a step to ask himself ‘what truth was sticking in their heads’; for even the falsest form of words (in Fleeming’s life-long opinion) reposed upon some truth, just as he could ‘not even allow that people admire ugly things, they admire what is pretty in the ugly thing.’ And before he sat down to write his letter, he thought he had hit upon the explanation. ‘I fancy the true idea,’ he wrote, ‘is that you must never do yourself or anyone else a moral injury—make any man a thief or a liar—for any end’; quite a different thing, as he would have loved to point out, from never stealing or lying. But this perfervid disputant was not always out of key with his audience. One whom he met in the same house announced that she would never again be happy. ‘What does that signify?’ cried Fleeming. ‘We are not here to be happy, but to be good.’ And the words (as his hearer writes to me) became to her a sort of motto during life.