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The Days Before Yesterday

by Lord Frederic Hamilton · English · Gutenberg #3827 · 516,019 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Days Before Yesterday

Author: Lord Frederic Hamilton


        
Release date: March 1, 2003 [eBook #3827]
                Most recently updated: January 9, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DAYS BEFORE YESTERDAY ***




Produced by Charles Franks, Robert Rowe and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.











THE DAYS BEFORE YESTERDAY


by

Lord Frederick Hamilton




FOREWORD


The Public has given so kindly a reception to The Varnished Pomps of
Yesterday (a reception which took its author wholly by surprise), that
I have extracted some further reminiscences from the lumber-room of
recollections. Those who expect startling revelations, or stale whiffs
of forgotten scandals in these pages, will, I fear, be disappointed,
for the book contains neither. It is merely a record of everyday
events, covering different ground to those recounted in the former
book, which may, or may not, prove of interest. I must tender my
apologies for the insistent recurrence of the first person singular; in
a book of this description this is difficult to avoid.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I

Early days--The passage of many terrors--Crocodiles, grizzlies and
hunchbacks--An adventurous journey and its reward--The famous spring in
South Audley Street--Climbing chimney-sweeps--The story of Mrs.
Montagu's son--The sweeps' carnival--Disraeli--Lord John Russell--A
child's ideas about the Whigs--The Earl of Aberdeen--"Old Brown
Bread"--Sir Edwin Landseer, a great family friend--A live lion at a
tea-party--Landseer as an artist--Some of his vagaries--His frescoes at
Ardverikie--His latter days--A devoted friend--His last Academy picture


CHAPTER II

The "swells" of the "sixties"--Old Lord Claud Hamilton--My first
presentation to Queen Victoria--Scandalous behaviour of a
brother--Queen Victoria's letters--Her character and strong common
sense--My mother's recollections of George III. and George IV.--Carlton
House, and the Brighton Pavilion--Queen Alexandra--The Fairchild
Family--Dr. Cumming and his church--A clerical Jazz--First visit to
Paris--General de Flahault's account of Napoleon's campaign of
1812--Another curious link with the past--"Something
French"--Attraction of Paris--Cinderella's glass slipper--A glimpse of
Napoleon III.--The Rue de Rivoli--The Riviera in 1865--A novel
Tricolour flag--Jenny Lind--The championship of the Mediterranean--My
father's boat and crew--The race--The Abercorn wins the championship


CHAPTER III

A new departure--A Dublin hotel in the "sixties"--The Irish mail
service--The wonderful old paddle mail-boats--The convivial waiters of
the Munster--The Viceregal Lodge--Indians and pirates--The imagination
of youth--A modest personal ambition--Death-warrants; imaginary and
real--The Fenian outbreak of 1866-7--The Abergele railway accident--A
Dublin Drawing-Room--Strictly private ceremonials--Some of the
amenities of the Chapel Royal--An unbidden spectator of the State
dinners--Irish wit--Judge Keogh--Father Healy--Happy Dublin knack of
nomenclature--An unexpected honour and its cause--Incidents of the
Fenian rising--Dr. Hatchell--A novel prescription--Visit of King
Edward--Gorgeous ceremonial, but a chilly drive--An anecdote of Queen
Alexandra


CHAPTER IV

Chittenden's--A wonderful teacher--My personal experiences as a
schoolmaster--My "boys in blue"--My unfortunate garments--A "brave
Belge"--The model boy, and his name--A Spartan regime--"The Three
Sundays"--Novel religious observances--Harrow--"John Smith of
Harrow"--"Tommy"--Steele--"Tosher"--An ingenious punishment--John
Farmer--His methods--The birth of a famous song--Harrow school
songs--"Ducker"--The "Curse of Versatility"--Advancing old age--The
race between three brothers--A family failing--My father's race at
sixty-four--My own--A most acrimonious dispute at Rome--Harrow after
fifty years


CHAPTER V

Mme. Ducros--A Southern French country town--"Tartarin de
Tarascon"--His prototypes at Nyons--M. Sisteron the roysterer--The
Southern French--An octogenarian pasteur--French
industry--"Bone-shakers"--A wonderful
"Cordon-bleu"--"Slop-basin"--French legal procedure--The
bons-vivants--The merry French judges--La gaiete francaise--Delightful
excursions--Some sleepy old towns--Oronge and Avignon--M. Thiers'
ingenious cousin--Possibilities--French political situation in
1874--The Comte de Chambord--Some French characteristics--High
intellectual level--Three days in a Trappist Monastery--Details of life
there--The Arian heresy--Silkworm culture--Tendencies of French to
complicate details--Some examples--Cicadas in London.


CHAPTER VI

Brunswick--Its beauty--High level of culture--The Brunswick
Theatre--Its excellence--Gas vs. Electricity--Primitive theatre
toilets--Operatic stars in private life--Some operas unknown in
London--Dramatic incidents in them--Levasseur's parody of
"Robert"--Some curious details about operas--Two fiery old
pan-Germans--Influence of the teaching profession on modern
Germany--The "French and English Clubs"--A meeting of the "English
Club" Some reflections about English reluctance to learn foreign
tongues--Mental attitude of non-Prussians in 1875--Concerning various
beers--A German sportsman--The silent, quinine-loving youth--The Harz
Mountains--A "Kettle-drive" for hares--Dialects of German--The odious
"Kaffee-Klatch"--Universal gossip--Hamburg's overpowering
hospitality--Hamburg's attitude towards Britain--The city itself--Trip
to British Heligoland--The island--Some peculiarities--Migrating
birds--Sir Fitzhardinge Maxse--Lady Maxse--The Heligoland
Theatre--Winter in Heligoland


CHAPTER VII

Some London beauties of the "seventies"--Great ladies--The Victorian
girl--Votaries of the Gaiety Theatre Two witty ladies--Two clever girls
and mock-Shakespeare--The family who talked Johnsonian
English--Old-fashioned tricks of pronunciation--Practical jokes--Lord
Charles Beresford and the old Club-member--The shoeless
legislator--Travellers' palms--The tree that spouted wine--Ceylon's
spicy breezes--Some reflections--Decline of public interest in
Parliament--Parliamentary giants--Gladstone, John Bright, and
Chamberlain--Gladstone's last speech--His resignation--W.H. Smith--The
Assistant Whips--Sir William Hart-Dyke--Weary hours at Westminster--A
Pseudo-Ingoldsbean Lay


CHAPTER VIII

The Foreign Office--The new Private Secretary--A Cabinet
key--Concerning theatricals--Some surnames which have passed into
everyday use--Theatricals at Petrograd--A mock-opera--The family from
Runcorn--An embarrassing predicament--Administering the oath--Secret
Service--Popular errors--Legitimate employment of information--The
Phoenix Park murders--I sanction an arrest--The innocent victim--The
execution of the murderers of Alexander II.--The jarring military
band--Black Magic--Sir Charles Wyke--Some of his experiences--The
seance at the Pantheon--Sir Charles' experiments on myself--The
Alchemists--The Elixir of Life, and the Philosopher's Stone--Lucid
directions for their manufacture--Glamis Castle and its
inhabitants--The tuneful Lyon family--Mr. Gladstone at Glamis--He sings
in the glees--The castle and its treasures--Recollections of Glamis


CHAPTER IX

Canada--The beginnings of the C.P.R.--Attitude of British Columbia--The
C.P.R. completed--Quebec--A swim at Niagara--Other mighty
waterfalls--Ottawa and Rideau Hall--Effects of dry climate--Personal
electricity--Every man his own dynamo--Attraction of Ottawa--The
"roaring game"--Skating--An ice-palace--A ball on skates--Difficulties
of translating the Bible into Eskimo--The building of the snow hut--The
snow hut in use--Sir John Macdonald--Some personal traits--The Canadian
Parliament buildings--Monsieur l'Orateur--A quaint oration--The "Pages'
Parliament"--An all-night sitting--The "Arctic Cremorne"--A curious
Lisbon custom--The Balkan "souvenir-hunters"--Personal inspection of
Canadian convents--Some incidents--The unwelcome novice--The Montreal
Carnival--The Ice-castle--The Skating Carnival--A stupendous toboggan
slide--The pioneer of "ski" in Canada--The old-fashioned raquettes--A
Canadian Spring--Wonders of the Dominion


CHAPTER X

Calcutta--Hooghly pilots--Government House--A Durbar--The sulky
Rajah--The customary formalities--An ingenious interpreter--The sailing
clippers in the Hooghly--Calcutta Cathedral--A succulent banquet--The
mistaken Minister--The "Gordons"--Barrackpore--A Swiss Family Robinson
aerial house--The child and the elephants--The merry midshipmen--Some
of their escapades--A huge haul of fishes--Queen Victoria and
Hindustani--The Hills--The Manipur outbreak--A riding tour--A wise old
Anglo-Indian--Incidents--The fidelity of native servants--A novel
printing-press--Lucknow--The loss of an illusion


CHAPTER XI

Matters left untold--The results of improved communications--My
father's journey to Naples--Modern stereotyped uniformity--Changes in
customs--The faithful family retainer--Some details--Samuel Pepys'
stupendous banquets--Persistence of idea--Ceremonial
incense--Patriarchal family life--The barn dances--My father's
habits--My mother--A son's tribute--Autumn days--Conclusion





THE DAYS BEFORE YESTERDAY




CHAPTER I


Early days--The passage of many terrors--Crocodiles, grizzlies and
hunchbacks--An adventurous journey and its reward--The famous spring in
South Audley Street--Climbing chimney-sweeps--The story of Mrs.
Montagu's son--The sweeps' carnival--Disraeli--Lord John Russell--A
child's ideas about the Whigs--The Earl of Aberdeen--"Old Brown
Bread"--Sir Edwin Landseer, a great family friend--A live lion at a
tea-party--Landseer as an artist--Some of his vagaries--His frescoes at
Ardverikie--His latter days--A devoted friend--His last Academy picture.


I was born the thirteenth child of a family of fourteen, on the
thirteenth day of the month, and I have for many years resided at No.
13 in a certain street in Westminster. In spite of the popular
prejudice attached to this numeral, I am not conscious of having
derived any particular ill-fortune from my accidental association with
it.

Owing to my sequence in the family procession, I found myself on my
entry into the world already equipped with seven sisters and four
surviving brothers. I was also in the unusual position of being born an
uncle, finding myself furnished with four ready-made nephews--the
present Lord Durham, his two brothers, Mr. Frederick Lambton and
Admiral-of-the-Fleet Sir Hedworth Meux, and the late Lord Lichfield.

Looking down the long vista of sixty years with eyes that have already
lost their keen vision, the most vivid impression that remains of my
early childhood is the nightly ordeal of the journey down "The Passage
of Many Terrors" in our Irish home. It had been decreed that, as I had
reached the mature age of six, I was quite old enough to come
downstairs in the evening by myself without the escort of a maid, but
no one seemed to realise what this entailed on the small boy
immediately concerned. The house had evidently been built by some
malevolent architect with the sole object of terrifying little boys.
Never, surely, had such a prodigious length of twisting, winding
passages and such a superfluity of staircases been crammed into one
building, and as in the early "sixties" electric light had not been
thought of, and there was no gas in the house, these endless passages
were only sparingly lit with dim colza-oil lamps. From his nursery the
little boy had to make his way alone through a passage and up some
steps. These were brightly lit, and concealed no terrors. The staircase
that had to be negotiated was also reassuringly bright, but at its base
came the "Terrible Passage." It was interminably long, and only lit by
an oil lamp at its far end. Almost at once a long corridor running at
right angles to the main one, and plunged in total darkness, had to be
crossed. This was an awful place, for under a marble slab in its dim
recesses a stuffed crocodile reposed. Of course in the daytime the
crocodile PRETENDED to be very dead, but every one knew that as soon as
it grew dark, the crocodile came to life again, and padded noiselessly
about the passage on its scaly paws seeking for its prey, with its
great cruel jaws snapping, its fierce teeth gleaming, and its horny
tail lashing savagely from side to side. It was also a matter of common
knowledge that the favourite article of diet of crocodiles was a little
boy with bare legs in a white suit. Even should one be fortunate enough
to escape the crocodile's jaws, there were countless other terrors
awaiting the traveller down this awe-inspiring passage. A little
farther on there was a dark lobby, with cupboards surrounding it. Any
one examining these cupboards by daylight would have found that they
contained innocuous cricket-bats and stumps, croquet-mallets and balls,
and sets of bowls. But as soon as the shades of night fell, these
harmless sporting accessories were changed by some mysterious and
malign agency into grizzly bears, and grizzly bears are notoriously the
fiercest of their species. It was advisable to walk very quickly, but
quietly, past the lair of the grizzlies, for they would have gobbled up
a little boy in one second. Immediately after the bears' den came the
culminating terror of all--the haunt of the wicked little hunchbacks.
These malignant little beings inhabited an arched and recessed
cross-passage. It was their horrible habit to creep noiselessly behind
their victims, tip...tip...tip-toeing silently but swiftly behind their
prey, and then ... with a sudden spring they threw themselves on to
little boys' backs, and getting their arms round their necks, they
remorselessly throttled the life out of them. In the early "sixties"
there was a perfect epidemic of so-called "garrotting" in London.
Harmless citizens proceeding peaceably homeward through unfrequented
streets or down suburban roads at night were suddenly seized from
behind by nefarious hands, and found arms pressed under their chins
against their windpipe, with a second hand drawing their heads back
until they collapsed insensible, and could be despoiled leisurely of
any valuables they might happen to have about them. Those familiar with
John Leech's Punch Albums will recollect how many of his drawings
turned on this outbreak of garrotting. The little boy had heard his
elders talking about this garrotting, and had somehow mixed it up with
a story about hunchbacks and the fascinating local tales about "the wee
people," but the terror was a very real one for all that. The
hunchbacks baffled, there only remained a dark archway to pass, but
this archway led to the "Robbers' Passage." A peculiarly bloodthirsty
gang of malefactors had their fastnesses along this passage, but the
dread of being in the immediate neighbourhood of such a band of
desperadoes was considerably modified by the increasing light, as the
solitary oil-lamp of the passage was approached. Under the comforting
beams of this lamp the little boy would pause until his heart began to
thump less wildly after his deadly perils, and he would turn the handle
of the door and walk into the great hall as demurely as though he had
merely traversed an ordinary everyday passage in broad daylight. It was
very reassuring to see the big hall blazing with light, with the logs
roaring on the open hearth, and grown-ups writing, reading, and talking
unconcernedly, as though unconscious of the awful dangers lurking
within a few yards of them. In that friendly atmosphere, what with toys
and picture-books, the fearful experiences of the "Passage of Many
Terrors" soon faded away, and the return journey upstairs would be free
from alarms, for Catherine, the nursery-maid, would come to fetch the
little boy when his bedtime arrived.

Catherine was fat, freckled, and French. She was also of a very stolid
disposition. She stumped unconcernedly along the "Passage of Terrors,"
and any reference to its hidden dangers of robbers, hunchbacks, bears,
and crocodiles only provoked the remark, "Quel tas de betises!" In
order to reassure the little boy, Catherine took him to view the
stuffed crocodile reposing inertly under its marble slab. Of course,
before a grown-up the crocodile would pretend to be dead and stuffed,
but ... the little boy knew better. It occurred gleefully to him, too,
that the plump French damsel might prove more satisfactory as a repast
to a hungry saurian than a skinny little boy with thin legs. In the
cheerful nursery, with its fragrant peat fire (we called it "turf"),
the terrors of the evening were quickly forgotten, only to be renewed
with tenfold activity next evening, as the moment for making the
dreaded journey again approached.

The little boy had had the Pilgrim's Progress read to him on Sundays.
He envied "Christian," who not only usually enjoyed the benefit of some
reassuring companion, such as "Mr. Interpreter," or "Mr. Greatheart,"
to help him on his road, but had also been expressly told, "Keep in the
midst of the path, and no harm shall come to thee." This was distinctly
comforting, and Christian enjoyed another conspicuous advantage. All
the lions he encountered in the course of his journey were chained up,
and could not reach him provided he adhered to the Narrow Way. The
little boy thought seriously of tying a rolled-up tablecloth to his
back to represent Christian's pack; in his white suit, he might perhaps
then pass for a pilgrim, and the strip of carpet down the centre of the
passage would make an admirable Narrow Way, but it all depended on
whether the crocodile, bears, and hunchbacks knew, and would observe
the rules of the game. It was most improbable that the crocodile had
ever had the Pilgrim's Progress read to him in his youth, and he might
not understand that the carpet representing the Narrow Way was
inviolable territory. Again, the bears might make their spring before
they realised that, strictly speaking, they ought to consider
themselves chained up. The ferocious little hunchbacks were clearly
past praying for; nothing would give them a sense of the most
elementary decency. On the whole, the safest plan seemed to be, on
reaching the foot of the stairs, to keep an eye on the distant lamp and
to run to it as fast as short legs and small feet could carry one. Once
safe under its friendly beams, panting breath could be recovered, and
the necessary stolid look assumed before entering the hall.

There was another voyage, rich in its promise of ultimate rewards, but
so perilous that it would only be undertaken under escort. That was to
the housekeeper's room through a maze of basement passages. On the road
two fiercely-gleaming roaring pits of fire had to be encountered.
Grown-ups said this was the furnace that heated the house, but the
little boy had his own ideas on the subject. Every Sunday his nurse
used to read to him out of a little devotional book, much in vogue in
the "sixties," called The Peep of Day, a book with the most terrifying
pictures. One Sunday evening, so it is said, the little boy's mother
came into the nursery to find him listening in rapt attention to what
his nurse was reading him.

"Emery is reading to me out of a good book," explained the small boy
quite superfluously.

"And do you like it, dear?"

"Very much indeed."

"What is Emery reading to you about? Is it about Heaven?"

"No, it's about 'ell," gleefully responded the little boy, who had not
yet found all his "h's."

Those glowing furnace-bars; those roaring flames ... there could be no
doubt whatever about it. A hymn spoke of "Gates of Hell" ... of course
they just called it the heating furnace to avoid frightening him. The
little boy became acutely conscious of his misdeeds. He had taken ...
no, stolen an apple from the nursery pantry and had eaten it. Against
all orders he had played with the taps in the sink. The burden of his
iniquities pressed heavily on him; remembering the encouraging warnings
Mrs. Fairchild, of The Fairchild Family, gave her offspring as to their
certain ultimate destiny when they happened to break any domestic rule,
he simply dared not pass those fiery apertures alone. With his hand in
that of his friend Joseph, the footman, it was quite another matter.
Out of gratitude, he addressed Joseph as "Mr. Greatheart," but Joseph,
probably unfamiliar with the Pilgrim's Progress, replied that his name
was Smith.

The interminable labyrinth of passages threaded, the warm, comfortable
housekeeper's room, with its red curtains, oak presses and a delicious
smell of spice pervading it, was a real haven of rest. To this very
day, nearly sixty years afterwards, it still looks just the same, and
keeps its old fragrant spicy odour. Common politeness dictated a brief
period of conversation, until Mrs. Pithers, the housekeeper, should
take up her wicker key-basket and select a key (the second press on the
left). From that inexhaustible treasure-house dates and figs would
appear, also dried apricots and those little discs of crystallised
apple-paste which, impaled upon straws, and coloured green, red and
yellow, were in those days manufactured for the special delectation of
greedy little boys. What a happy woman Mrs. Pithers must have been with
such a prodigal wealth of delicious products always at her command! It
was comforting, too, to converse with Mrs. Pithers, for though this
intrepid woman was alarmed neither by bears, hunchbacks nor crocodiles,
she was terribly frightened by what she termed "cows," and regulated
her daily walks so as to avoid any portion of the park where cattle
were grazing. Here the little boy experienced a delightful sense of
masculine superiority. He was not the least afraid of cattle, or of
other things in daylight and the open air; of course at night in dark
passages infested with bears and little hunchbacks ... Well, it was
obviously different. And yet that woman who was afraid of "cows" could
walk without a tremor, or a little shiver down the spine, past the very
"Gates of Hell," where they roared and blazed in the dark passage.

Our English home had brightly-lit passages, and was consequently
practically free from bears and robbers. Still, we all preferred the
Ulster home in spite of its obvious perils. Here were a chain of lakes,
wide, silvery expanses of gleaming water reflecting the woods and
hills. Here were great tracts of woodlands where countless little burns
chattered and tinkled in their rocky beds as they hurried down to the
lakes, laughing as they tumbled in miniature cascades over rocky ledges
into swirling pools, in their mad haste to reach the placid waters
below. Here were purple heather-clad hills, with their bigger brethren
rising mistily blue in the distance, and great wine-coloured tracts of
bog (we called them "flows") interspersed with glistening bands of
water, where the turf had been cut which hung over the village in a
thin haze of fragrant blue smoke.

The woods in the English place were beautifully kept, but they were
uninteresting, for there were no rocks or great stones in them. An
English brook was a dull, prosaic, lifeless stream, rolling its
clay-stained waters stolidly along, with never a dimple of laughter on
its surface, or a joyous little gurgle of surprise at finding that it
was suddenly called upon to take a headlong leap of ten feet. The
English brooks were so silent, too, compared to our noisy Ulster burns,
whose short lives were one clamorous turmoil of protest against the
many obstacles with which nature had barred their progress to the sea;
here swirling over a miniature crag, there babbling noisily among a
labyrinth of stones. They ultimately became merged in a foaming,
roaring salmon river, expanding into amber-coloured pools, or breaking
into white rapids; a river which retained to the last its lordly
independence and reached the sea still free, refusing to be harnessed
or confined by man. Our English brook, after its uneventful childhood,
made its stolid matter-of-fact way into an equally dull little river
which crawled inertly along to its destiny somewhere down by the docks.
I know so many people whose whole lives are like that of that
particular English brook.

We lived then in London at Chesterfield House, South Audley Street,
which covered three times the amount of ground it does at present, for
at the back it had a very large garden, on which Chesterfield Gardens
are now built. In addition to this it had two wings at right angles to
it, one now occupied by Lord Leconfield's house, the other by Nos. 1
and 2, South Audley Street. The left-hand wing was used as our stables
and contained a well which enjoyed an immense local reputation in
Mayfair. Never was such drinking-water! My father allowed any one in
the neighbourhood to fetch their drinking-water from our well, and one
of my earliest recollections is watching the long daily procession of
men-servants in the curious yellow-jean jackets of the "sixties," each
with two large cans in his hands, fetching the day's supply of our
matchless water. No inhabitants of Curzon Street, Great Stanhope
Street, or South Audley Street would dream of touching any water but
that from the famous Chesterfield House spring. In 1867 there was a
serious outbreak of Asiatic cholera in London, and my father determined
to have the water of the celebrated spring analysed. There were loud
protests at this:--what, analyse the finest drinking-water in England!
My father, however, persisted, and the result of the analysis was that
our incomparable drinking-water was found to contain thirty per cent.
of organic matter. The analyst reported that fifteen per cent. of the
water must be pure sewage. My father had the spring sealed and bricked
up at once, but it is a marvel that we had not poisoned every single
inhabitant of the Mayfair district years before.

In the early "sixties" the barbarous practice of sending wretched
little "climbing boys" up chimneys to sweep them still prevailed. In
common with most other children of that day, I was perfectly terrified
when the chimney-sweep arrived with his attendant coal-black imps, for
the usual threat of foolish nurses to their charges when they proved
refractory was, "If you are not good I shall give you to the sweep, and
then you will have to climb up the chimney." When the dust-sheets laid
on the floors announced the advent of the sweeps, I used, if possible,
to hide until they had left the house. I cannot understand how public
opinion tolerated for so long the abominable cruelty of forcing little
boys to clamber up flues. These unhappy brats were made to creep into
the chimneys from the grates, and then to wriggle their way up by
digging their toes into the interstices of the bricks, and by working
their elbows and knees alternately; stifled in the pitch-darkness of
the narrow flue by foul air, suffocated by the showers of soot that
fell on them, perhaps losing their way in the black maze of chimneys,
and liable at any moment, should they lose their footing, to come
crashing down twenty feet, either to be killed outright in the dark or
to lie with a broken limb until they were extricated--should, indeed,
it be possible to rescue them at all. These unfortunate children, too,
were certain to get abrasions on their bare feet and on their elbows
and knees from the rough edges of the bricks. The soot working into
these abrasions gave them a peculiar form of sore. Think of the
terrible brutality to which a nervous child must have been subjected
before he could be induced to undertake so hateful a journey for the
first time. Should the boy hesitate to ascend, many of the
master-sweeps had no compunction in giving him what was termed a
"tickler"--that is, in lighting some straw in the grate below him. The
poor little urchin had perforce to scramble up his chimney then, to
avoid being roasted alive.

All honour to the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, the philanthropist, who
as Lord Ashley never rested in the House of Commons until he got a
measure placed on the Statute Book making the employment of
climbing-boys illegal.

It will be remembered that little Tom, the hero of Charles Kingsley's
delightful Water-Babies, was a climbing-sweep. In spite of all my care,
I occasionally met some of these little fellows in the passages,
inky-black with soot from the soles of their bare feet to the crowns of
their heads, except for the whites of their eyes. They could not have
been above eight or nine years old. I looked on them as awful warnings,
for of course they would not have occupied their present position had
they not been little boys who had habitually disobeyed the orders of
their nurses.

Even the wretched little climbing-boys had their gala-day on the 1st of
May, when they had a holiday and a feast under the terms of Mrs.
Montagu's will.

The story of Mrs. Montagu is well known. The large house standing in a
garden at the corner of Portman Square and Gloucester Place, now owned
by Lord Portman, was built for Mrs. Montagu by James Wyatt at the end
of the eighteenth century, and the adjoining Montagu Street and Montagu
Square derive their names from her. Somehow Mrs. Montagu's only son got
kidnapped, and all attempts to recover the child failed. Time went on,
and he was regarded as dead. On a certain 1st of May the sweeps arrived
to clean Mrs. Montagu's chimneys, and a climbing-boy was sent up to his
horrible task. Like Tom in the Water-Babies, he lost his way in the
network of flues and emerged in a different room to the one he had
started from. Something in the aspect of the room struck a
half-familiar, half-forgotten chord in his brain. He turned the handle
of the door of the next room and found a lady seated there. Then he
remembered. Filthy and soot-stained as he was, the little sweep flung
himself into the arms of the beautiful lady with a cry of "Mother!"
Mrs. Montagu had found her lost son.

In gratitude for the recovery of her son, Mrs. Montagu entertained
every climbing-boy in London at dinner on the anniversary of her son's
return, and arranged that they should all have a holiday on that day.
At her death she left a legacy to continue the treat.

Such, at least, is the story as I have always heard it.

At the Sweeps' Carnival, there was always a grown-up man figuring as
"Jack-in-the-green." Encased in an immense frame of wicker-work covered
with laurels and artificial flowers, from the midst of which his face
and arms protruded with a comical effect, "Jack-in-the-green" capered
slowly about in the midst of the street, surrounded by some twenty
little climbing-boys, who danced joyously round him with black faces,
their soot-stained clothes decorated with tags of bright ribbon, and
making a deafening clamour with their dustpans and brushes as they sang
some popular ditty. They then collected money from the passers-by,
making usually quite a good haul. There were dozens of these
"Jacks-in-the-green" to be seen then on Mayday in the London streets,
each one with his attendant band of little black familiars. I summoned
up enough courage once to ask a small inky-black urchin whether he had
disobeyed his nurse very often in order to be condemned to sweep
chimneys. He gaped at me uncomprehendingly, with a grin; but being a
cheerful little soul, assured me that, on the whole, he rather enjoyed
climbing up chimneys.

It was my father and mother's custom in London to receive any of their
friends at luncheon without a formal invitation, and a constant
procession of people availed themselves of this privilege. At six years
of age I was promoted to lunch in the dining-room with my parents, and
I always kept my ears open. I had then one brother in the House of
Commons, and we being a politically inclined family, most of the
notabilities of the Tory party put in occasional appearances at
Chesterfield House at luncheon-time. There was Mr. Disraeli, for whom
my father had an immense admiration, although he had not yet occupied
the post of Prime Minister. Mr. Disraeli's curiously impassive face,
with its entire absence of colouring, rather frightened me. It looked
like a mask. He had, too, a most singular voice, with a very impressive
style of utterance. After 1868, by which time my three elder brothers
were all in the House of Commons, and Disraeli himself was Prime
Minister, he was a more frequent visitor at our house.

In 1865 my uncle, Lord John Russell, my mother's brother, was Prime
Minister. My uncle, who had been born as far back as 1792, was a very
tiny man, who always wore one of the old-fashioned, high black-satin
stocks right up to his chin. I liked him, for he was always full of fun
and small jokes, but in that rigorously Tory household he was looked on
with scant favour. It was his second term of office as Prime Minister,
for he had been First Lord of the Treasury from 1846 to 1852; he had
also sat in the House of Commons for forty-seven years. My father was
rather inclined to ridicule his brother-in-law's small stature, and
absolutely detested his political opinions, declaring that he united
all the ineradicable faults of the Whigs in his diminutive person.
Listening, as a child will do, to the conversation of his elders, I
derived the most grotesquely false ideas as to the Whigs and their
traditional policy. I gathered that, with their tongues in their
cheeks, they advocated measures in which they did not themselves
believe, should they think that by so doing they would be able to
enhance their popularity and maintain themselves in office: that, in
order to extricate themselves from some present difficulty, they were
always prepared to mortgage the future recklessly, quite regardless of
the ultimate consequences: that whilst professing the most liberal
principles, they were absurdly exclusive in their private lives, not
consorting with all and sundry as we poor Tories did: that convictions
mattered less than office: that in fact nothing much mattered, provided
that the government of the country remained permanently in the hands of
a little oligarchy of Whig families, and that every office of profit
under the Crown was, as a matter of course, allotted to some member of
those favoured families. In proof of the latter statement, I learnt
that the first act of my uncle Lord John, as Prime Minister, had been
to appoint one of his brothers Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of
Commons, and to offer to another of his brothers, the Rev. Lord
Wriothesley Russell, the vacant Bishopric of Oxford. Much to the credit
of my clergyman-uncle, he declined the Bishopric, saying that he had
neither the eloquence nor the administrative ability necessary for so
high an office in the Church, and that he preferred to remain a plain
country parson in his little parish, of which, at the time of his
death, he had been Rector for fifty-six years. All of which only goes
to show what absurdly erroneous ideas a child, anxious to learn, may
pick up from listening to the conversation of his elders, even when one
of those elders happened to be Mr. Disraeli himself.

Another ex-Prime Minister who was often at our house was the fourth
Earl of Aberdeen, who had held office many times, and had been Prime
Minister during the Crimean War. He must have been a very old man then,
for he was born in 1784. I have no very distinct recollection of him.
Oddly enough, Lord Aberdeen was both my great-uncle and my
step-grandfather, for his first wife had been my grandfather's sister,
and after her death, he married my grandfather's widow, his two wives
thus being sisters-in-law. Judging by their portraits by Lawrence,
which hung round our dining-room, my great-grandfather, old Lord
Abercorn's sons and daughters must have been of singular and quite
unusual personal beauty. Not one of the five attained the age of
twenty-nine, all of them succumbing early to consumption. Lord Aberdeen
had a most unfortunate skin and complexion, and in addition he was
deeply pitted with small-pox. As a result his face looked exactly like
a slice of brown bread, and "Old Brown Bread" he was always called by
my elder brothers and sisters, who had but little love for him, for he
disliked young people, and always made the most disagreeable remarks he
could think of to them. I remember once being taken to see him at
Argyll House, Regent Street, on the site of which the "Palladium" now
stands. I recollect perfectly the ugly, gloomy house, and its uglier
and gloomier garden, but I have no remembrance of "Old Brown Bread"
himself, or of what he said to me, which, considering his notorious
dislike to children, is perhaps quite as well.

Of a very different type was another constant and always welcome
visitor to our house, Sir Edwin Landseer, the painter. He was one of my
father and mother's oldest friends, and had been an equally close
friend of my grandparents, the Duke and Duchess of Bedford. He had
painted three portraits of my father, and five of my mother. Two of the
latter had been engraved, and, under the titles of "Cottage Industry"
and "The Mask," had a very large sale in mid-Victorian days. His large
picture of my two eldest sisters, which hung over our dining-room
chimney-piece, had also been engraved, and was a great favourite, under
the title of "The Abercorn Children." Landseer was a most delightful
person, and the best company that can be imagined. My father and mother
were quite devoted to him, and both of them always addressed him as
"Lanny." My mother going to call on him at his St. John's Wood house,
found "Lanny" in the garden, working from a ladder on a gigantic mass
of clay. Turning the corner, she was somewhat alarmed at finding a
full-grown lion stretched out on the lawn. Landseer had been
commissioned by the Government to model the four lions for the base of
Nelson's pillar in Trafalgar Square. He had made some studies in the
Zoological Gardens, but as he always preferred working from the live
model, he arranged that an elderly and peculiarly docile lion should be
brought to his house from the Zoo in a furniture van attended by two
keepers. Should any one wish to know what that particular lion looked
like, they have only to glance at the base of the Nelson pillar. On
paying an afternoon call, it is so unusual to find a live lion included
amongst the guests, that my mother's perturbation at finding herself in
such close proximity to a huge loose carnivore is, perhaps, pardonable.
Landseer is, of course, no longer in fashion as a painter. I quite own
that at times his colour is unpleasing, owing to the bluish tint
overlaying it; but surely no one will question his draughtsmanship? And
has there ever been a finer animal-painter? Perhaps he was really a
black-and-white man. My family possess some three hundred drawings of
his: some in pen and ink, some in wash, some in pencil. I personally
prefer his very delicate pencil work, over which he sometimes threw a
light wash of colour. No one, seeing some of his pen and ink work, can
deny that he was a master of line. A dozen scratches, and the whole
picture is there! There is a charming little Landseer portrait of my
mother with my eldest sister, in Room III of the Tate Gallery. Landseer
preferred painting on panel, and he never would allow his pictures to
be varnished. His wishes have been obeyed in that respect; none of the
Landseers my family possess have ever been varnished.

He was certainly an unconventional guest in a country house. My father
had rented a deer-forest on a long lease from Cluny Macpherson, and had
built a large house there, on Loch Laggan. As that was before the days
of railways, the interior of the house at Ardverikie was necessarily
very plain, and the rooms were merely whitewashed. Landseer complained
that the glare of the whitewash in the dining-room hurt his eyes, and
without saying a word to any one, he one day produced his colours,
mounted a pair of steps, and proceeded to rough-in a design in charcoal
on the white walls. He worked away until he had completely covered the
walls with frescoes in colour. The originals of some of his best-known
engravings, "The Sanctuary," "The Challenge," "The Monarch of the
Glen," made their first appearance on the walls of the dining-room at
Ardverikie. The house was unfortunately destroyed by fire some years
later, and Landseer's frescoes perished with it.

At another time, my father leased for two years a large house in the
Midlands. The dining-hall of this house was hung with hideously wooden
full-length portraits of the family owning it. Landseer declared that
these monstrous pictures took away his appetite, so without any
permission he one day mounted a ladder, put in high-lights with white
chalk over the oils, made the dull eyes sparkle, and gave some
semblance of life to these forlorn effigies. Pleased with his success,
he then brightened up the flesh tints with red chalk, and put some
drawing into the faces. To complete his work, he rubbed blacks into the
backgrounds with charcoal. The result was so excellent that we let it
remain. At the conclusion of my father's tenancy, the family to whom
the place belonged were perfectly furious at the disrespect with which
their cherished portraits had been treated, for it was a traditional
article of faith with them that they were priceless works of art.

Towards the end of his life Landseer became hopelessly insane and,
during his periods of violence a dangerous homicidal maniac. Such an
affection, however, had my father and mother for the friend of their
younger days, that they still had him to stay with us in Kent for long
periods. He had necessarily to bring a large retinue with him: his own
trained mental attendant; Dr. Tuke, a very celebrated alienist in his
day; and, above all, Mrs. Pritchard. The case of Mrs. Pritchard is such
an instance of devoted friendship as to be worth recording. She was an
elderly widow of small means, Landseer's neighbour in St. John's Wood;
a little dried-up, shrivelled old woman. The two became firm allies,
and when Landseer's reason became hopelessly deranged, Mrs. Pritchard
devoted her whole life to looking after her afflicted friend. In spite
of her scanty means, she refused to accept any salary, and Landseer was
like wax in her hands. In his most violent moods when the keeper and
Dr. Tuke both failed to quiet him, Mrs. Pritchard had only to hold up
her finger and he became calm at once. Either his clouded reason or
some remnant of his old sense of fun led him to talk of Mrs. Pritchard
as his "pocket Venus." To people staying with us (who, I think, were a
little alarmed at finding themselves in the company of a lunatic,
however closely watched he might be), he would say, "In two minutes you
will see the loveliest of her sex. A little dainty creature, perfect in
feature, perfect in shape, who might have stepped bodily out of the
frame of a Greuze. A perfect dream of loveliness." They were
considerably astonished when a little wizened woman, with a face like a
withered apple, entered the room. He was fond, too, of descanting on
Mrs. Pritchard's wonderfully virtuous temperament, notwithstanding her
amazing charms. Visitors probably reflected that, given her appearance,
the path of duty must have been rendered very easy to her.

Landseer painted his last Academy picture, "The Baptismal Font," whilst
staying with us. It is a perfectly meaningless composition,
representing a number of sheep huddled round a font, for whatever
allegorical significance he originally meant to give it eluded the poor
clouded brain. As he always painted from the live model, he sent down
to the Home Farm for two sheep, which he wanted driven upstairs into
his bedroom, to the furious indignation of the housekeeper, who
declared, with a certain amount of reason, that it was impossible to
keep a house well if live sheep were to be allowed in the best
bedrooms. So Landseer, his easel and colours and his sheep were all
transferred to the garden.

On another occasion there was some talk about a savage bull. Landseer,
muttering, "Bulls! bulls! bulls!" snatched up an album of my sister's,
and finding a blank page in it, made an exquisite little drawing of a
charging bull. The disordered brain repeating "Bulls! bulls! bulls!" he
then drew a bulldog, a pair of bullfinches surrounded by bulrushes, and
a hooked bull trout fighting furiously for freedom. That page has been
cut out and framed for fifty years.




CHAPTER II


The "swells" of the "sixties"--Old Lord Claud Hamilton--My first
presentation to Queen Victoria--Scandalous behaviour of a
brother--Queen Victoria's letters--Her character and strong common
sense--My mother's recollections of George III. and George IV.--Carlton
House, and the Brighton Pavilion--Queen Alexandra--The Fairchild
Family--Dr. Cumming and his church--A clerical Jazz--First visit to
Paris--General de Flahault's account of Napoleon's campaign of
1812--Another curious link with the past--"Something
French"--Attraction of Paris--Cinderella's glass slipper--A glimpse of
Napoleon III.--The Rue de Rivoli The Riviera in 1865--A novel Tricolor
flag--Jenny Lind--The championship of the Mediterranean--My father's
boat and crew--The race--The Abercorn wins the championship.


Every one familiar with John Leech's Pictures from Punch must have an
excellent idea of the outward appearance of "swells" of the "sixties."

As a child I had an immense admiration for these gorgeous beings,
though, between ourselves, they must have been abominably loud
dressers. They affected rather vulgar sealskin waistcoats, with the
festoons of a long watch-chain meandering over them, above which they
exhibited a huge expanse of black or blue satin, secured by two
scarf-pins of the same design, linked together, like Siamese twins, by
a little chain.

A reference to Leech's drawings will show the flamboyant checked
"pegtop" trousers in which they delighted. Their principal adornment
lay in their immense "Dundreary" whiskers, usually at least eight
inches long. In a high wind these immensely long whiskers blew back
over their owners' shoulders in the most comical fashion, and they must
have been horribly inconvenient. I determined early in life to affect,
when grown-up, longer whiskers than any one else--if possible down to
my waist; but alas for human aspirations! By the time that I had
emerged from my chrysalis stage, Dundreary whiskers had ceased to be
the fashion; added to which unkind Nature had given me a hairless face.

My uncle, old Lord Claud Hamilton, known in our family as "The
Dowager," adhered, to the day of his death, to the William IV. style of
dress. He wore an old-fashioned black-satin stock right up to his chin,
with white "gills" above, and was invariably seen in a blue coat with
brass buttons, and a buff waistcoat. My uncle was one of the handsomest
men in England, and had sat for nearly forty years in Parliament. He
had one curious faculty. He could talk fluently and well on almost any
topic at indefinite length, a very useful gift in the House of Commons
of those days. On one occasion when it was necessary "to talk a Bill
out," he got up without any preparation whatever, and addressed the
House in flowing periods for four hours and twenty minutes. His speech
held the record for length for many years, but it was completely
eclipsed in the early "eighties" by the late Mr. Biggar, who spoke (if
my memory serves me right) for nearly six hours on one occasion.
Biggar, however, merely read interminable extracts from Blue Books,
whereas my uncle indulged in four hours of genuine rhetorical
declamation. My uncle derived his nickname from the fact that in our
family the second son is invariably christened Claud, so I had already
a brother of that name. There happen to be three Lord Claud Hamiltons
living now, of three successive generations.

I shall never forget my bitter disappointment the first time I was
taken, at a very early age, to see Queen Victoria. I had pictured to
myself a dazzling apparition arrayed in sumptuous robes, seated on a
golden throne; a glittering crown on her head, a sceptre in one hand,
an orb grasped in the other. I had fancied Her Majesty seated thus,
motionless during the greater part of the twenty-four hours, simply
"reigning." I could have cried with disappointment when a middle-aged
lady, simply dressed in widow's "weeds" and wearing a widow's cap, rose
from an ordinary arm-chair to receive us. I duly made my bow, but
having a sort of idea that it had to be indefinitely repeated, went on
nodding like a porcelain Chinese mandarin, until ordered to stop.

Between ourselves, I behaved far better than a brother of mine once did
under similar circumstances. Many years before I was born, my father
lent his Scotch house to Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort for ten
days. This entailed my two eldest sisters and two eldest brothers
vacating their nurseries in favour of the Royal children, and their
being transferred to the farm, where they had very cramped quarters
indeed. My second brother deeply resented being turned out of his
comfortable nursery, and refused to be placated. On the day after the
Queen's arrival, my mother took her four eldest children to present
them to Her Majesty, my sisters dressed in their best clothes, my
brothers being in kilts. They were duly instructed as to how they were
to behave, and upon being presented, my two sisters made their
curtsies, and my eldest brother made his best bow. "And this, your
Majesty, is my second boy. Make your bow, dear," said my mother; but my
brother, his heart still hot within him at being expelled from his
nursery, instead of bowing, STOOD ON HIS HEAD IN HIS KILT, and remained
like that, an accomplishment of which he was very proud. The Queen was
exceedingly angry, so later in the day, upon my brother professing deep
penitence, he was taken back to make his apologies, when he did
precisely the same thing over again, and was consequently in disgrace
during the whole of the Royal visit. In strict confidence, I believe
that he would still do it to-day, more than seventy-two years later.

During her stay in my father's house the Queen quite unexpectedly
announced that she meant to give a dance. This put my mother in a great
difficulty, for my sisters had no proper clothes for a ball, and in
those pre-railway days it would have taken at least ten days to get
anything from Edinburgh or Glasgow. My mother had a sudden inspiration.
The muslin curtains in the drawing-room! The drawing-room curtains were
at once commandeered; the ladies'-maids set to work with a will, and I
believe that my sisters looked extremely well dressed in the curtains,
looped up with bunches of rowan or mountain-ash berries.

My mother was honoured with Queen Victoria's close friendship and
confidence for over fifty years. At the time of her death she had in
her possession a numerous collection of letters from the Queen, many of
them very long ones. By the express terms of my mother's will, those
letters will never be published. Many of them touch on exceedingly
private matters relating to the Royal family, others refer to various
political problems of the day. I have read all those letters carefully,
and I fully endorse my mother's views. She was honoured with the
confidence of her Sovereign, and that confidence cannot be betrayed.
The letters are in safe custody, and there they will remain. On reading
them it is impossible not to be struck with Queen Victoria's amazing
shrewdness, and with her unfailing common sense. It so happens that
both a brother and a sister of mine, the late Duchess of Buccleuch,
were brought into very close contact with Queen Victoria. It was this
quality of strong common sense in the Queen which continually impressed
them, as well as her very high standard of duty.

My brother George was twice Secretary of State for India. The Queen was
fond of suggesting amendments in the wording of dispatches relating to
India, whilst not altering their sense. My brother tells me that the
alterations suggested by the Queen were invariably in the direction of
simplification. The Queen had a knack of stripping away unnecessary
verbiage and reducing a sentence to its simplest form, in which its
meaning was unmistakably clear.

All Queen Victoria's tastes were simple. She liked simplicity in dress,
in food, and in her surroundings. If I may say so without disrespect, I
think that Queen Victoria's great hold on her people came from the fact
that, in spite of her high station, she had the ideals, the tastes, the
likes and dislikes of the average clean-living, clean-minded wife of
the average British professional man, together with the strict ideals
as to the sanctity of the marriage-tie, the strong sense of duty, and
the high moral standard such wives usually possess.

It is, of course, the easy fashion now to sneer at Victorian standards.
To my mind they embody all that is clean and sound in the nation. It
does not follow that because Victorians revelled in hideous wall-papers
and loved ugly furniture, that therefore their points-of-view were
mistaken ones. There are things more important than wall-papers. They
certainly liked the obvious in painting, in music, and perhaps in
literature, but it hardly seems to follow logically from that, that
their conceptions of a man's duty to his wife, family, and country were
necessarily false ones. They were not afflicted with the perpetual
modern restlessness, nor did they spend "their time in nothing else,
but either to tell, or to hear some new thing"; still, all their ideas
seem to me eminently sweet and wholesome.

In her old age my mother was the last person living who had seen George
III. She remembered perfectly seeing the old King, in one of his rare
lucid intervals, driving through London, when he was enthusiastically
cheered.

She was also the last person alive who had been at Carlton House which
was pulled down in 1826. My mother at the age of twelve danced as a
solo "The Spanish Shawl dance" before George IV. at the Pavilion,
Brighton. The King was so delighted with her dancing that he went up to
her and said, "You are a very pretty little girl, and you dance
charmingly. Now is there anything I can do for you?" The child
answered, "Yes, there is. Your Majesty can bring me some ham sandwiches
and a glass of port-wine negus, for I am very hungry," and to do George
IV. justice, he promptly brought them. My mother was painted by a
French artist doing her "shawl dance," and if it is a faithful
likeness, she must have been an extraordinarily pretty child. On
another occasion at a children's party at Carlton House, my uncle,
General Lord Alexander Russell, a very outspoken little boy, had been
warned by his mother, the Duchess of Bedford, that though the King wore
a palpable wig, he was to take no notice whatever of it. To my mother's
dismay, she heard her little brother go up to the King and say, "I know
that your Majesty wears a wig, but I've been told not to say anything
about it, so I promised not to tell any one."

Carlton House stood, from all I can learn, at the top of the Duke of
York's steps. Several engravings of its beautiful gardens are still to
be found. These gardens extended from the present Carlton House Terrace
to Pall Mall. Not only the Terrace, but the Carlton, Reform,
Travellers', Athenaeum, and United Service Clubs now stand on their
site. They were separated from Pall Mall by an open colonnade, and the
Corinthian pillars from the front of Carlton House were re-erected in
1834 as the portico of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.

As a child I had a wild adoration for Queen Alexandra (then, of course,
Princess of Wales), whom I thought the most beautiful person I had ever
seen in my life, and I dare say that I was not far wrong. When I was
taken to Marlborough House, I remembered and treasured up every single
word she said to me. I was not present at the child's tea-party at
Marlborough House given by the little Princess, including his present
Majesty, when SOME ONE (my loyalty absolutely refuses to let me say
who) suggested that as the woven flowers on the carpet looked rather
faded, it might be as well to water them. The boys present, including
the little Princes, gleefully emptied can after can of water on to the
floor in their attempts to revive the carpet, to the immense
improvement of the ceiling and furniture of the room underneath.

In the "sixties" Sunday was very strictly observed. In our own
Sabbatarian family, our toys and books all disappeared on Saturday
night. On Sundays we were only allowed to read Line upon Line, The Peep
of Day, and The Fairchild Family. I wonder if any one ever reads this
book now. If they haven't, they should. Mr. and Mrs. Fairchild were, I
regret to say it, self-righteous prigs of the deepest dye, whilst Lucy,
Emily, and Henry, their children, were all little prodigies of
precocious piety. It was a curious menage; Mr. Fairchild having no
apparent means of livelihood, and no recreations beyond perpetually
reading the Bible under a tree in the garden. Mrs. Fairchild had the
peculiar gift of being able to recite a different prayer off by heart
applicable to every conceivable emergency; whilst John, their
man-servant, was a real "handy-man," for he was not only gardener, but
looked after the horse and trap, cleaned out the pigsties, and waited
at table. One wonders in what sequence he performed his various duties,
but perhaps the Fairchilds had not sensitive noses. Even the possibly
odoriferous John had a marvellous collection of texts at his command.
It was refreshing after all this to learn that on one occasion all
three of the little Fairchilds got very drunk, which, as the eldest of
them was only ten, would seem to indicate that, in spite of their
aggressive piety, they had their fair dose of original sin still left
in them. I liked the book notwithstanding. There was plenty about
eating and drinking; one could always skip the prayers, and there were
three or four very brightly written accounts of funerals in it. I was
present at a "Fairchild Family" dinner given some twenty years ago in
London by Lady Buxton, wife of the present Governor-General of South
Africa, at which every one of the guests had to enact one of the
characters of the book.

My youngest brother had a great taste for drawing, and was perpetually
depicting terrific steeplechases. From a confusion of ideas natural to
a child, he always introduced a church steeple into the corner of his
drawings. One Sunday he had drawn a most spirited and hotly-contested
"finish" to a steeplechase. When remonstrated with on the ground that
it was not a "Sunday" subject, he pointed to the church steeple and
said, "You don't understand. This is Sunday, and those jockeys are all
racing to see which of them can get to church first," which strikes me
as a peculiarly ready and ingenious explanation for a child of six.

In London we all went on Sundays to the Scottish Presbyterian Church in
Crown Court, just opposite Drury Lane Theatre. Dr. Cumming, the
minister of the church at that time, enjoyed an immense reputation
amongst his congregation. He was a very eloquent man, but was
principally known as always prophesying the imminent end of the world.
He had been a little unfortunate in some of the dates he had predicted
for the final cataclysm, these dates having slipped by uneventfully
without anything whatever happening, but finally definitely fixed on a
date in 1867 as the exact date of the Great Catastrophe. His influence
with his flock rather diminished when it was found that Dr. Cumming had
renewed the lease of his house for twenty-one years, only two months
before the date he had fixed with absolute certainty as being the end
of all things. All the same, I am certain that he was thoroughly in
earnest and perfectly genuine in his convictions. As a child I thought
the church--since rebuilt--absolutely beautiful, but it was in reality
a great, gaunt, barn-like structure. It was always crammed. We were
very old-fashioned, for we sat down to sing, and we stood to pray, and
there was no instrument of any sort. The pew in front of us belonged to
Lord Aberdeen, and his brother Admiral Gordon, one of the Elders,
always sat in it with his high hat on, conversing at the top of his
voice until the minister entered, when he removed his hat and kept
silence. This was, I believe, intended as a protest against the idea of
there being any special sanctity attached to the building itself qua
building. Dr. Cumming had recently introduced an anthem, a new
departure rather dubiously welcomed by his flock. It was the singular
custom of his congregation to leave their pews during the singing of
this anthem and to move about in the aisles; whether as a protest
against a daring innovation, or merely to stretch their limbs, or to
seek better places, I could never make out.

Dr. Cumming invariably preached for over an hour, sometimes for an hour
and a half, and yet I never felt bored or wearied by his long
discourses, but really looked forward to them. This was because his
sermons, instead of consisting of a string of pious platitudes,
interspersed with trite ejaculations and irrelevant quotations, were
one long chain of closely-reasoned argument. Granted his first premiss,
his second point followed logically from it, and so he led his hearers
on point by point, all closely argued, to an indisputable conclusion. I
suppose that the inexorable logic of it all appealed to the Scottish
side of me. His preaching had the same fascination for me that Euclid's
propositions exercised later, even on my hopelessly unmathematical mind.

Whatever the weather, we invariably walked home from Drury Lane to
South Audley Street, a long trudge for young feet, as my mother had
scruples about using the carriages on Sundays.

Neither my father nor my mother ever dined out on a Sunday, nor did
they invite people to dinner on that day, for they wished as far as
possible to give those in their employment a day of rest. All quite
hopelessly Victorian! for, after all, why should people ever think of
anybody but themselves?

Dr. Cumming was a great bee-fancier, and a recognised authority on
bees. Calling one day on my mother, he brought with him four queen-bees
of a new breed, each one encased in a little paper bag. He prided
himself on his skill in handling bees, and proudly exhibited those
treasures to my mother. He replaced them in their paper bags, and being
a very absent-minded man, he slipped the bags into the tail pocket of
his clerical frock-coat. Soon after he began one of his long arguments
(probably fixing the exact date of the end of the world), and, totally
oblivious of the presence of the bees in his tail pocket, he leant
against the mantelpiece. The queen-bees, naturally resenting the
pressure, stung him through the cloth on that portion of his anatomy
immediately nearest to their temporary prison. Dr. Cumming yelled with
pain, and began skipping all round the room. It so tickled my fancy to
see the grim and austere minister, who towered above me in the pulpit
every Sunday, executing a sort of solo-Jazz dance up and down the big
room, punctuated with loud cries, that I rolled about on the floor with
laughter.

The London of the "sixties" was a very dark and dingy place. The
streets were sparingly lit with the dimmest of gas-jets set very far
apart: the shop-windows made no display of lights, and the general
effect was one of intense gloom.

Until I was seven years old, I had never left the United Kingdom. We
then all went to Paris for a fortnight, on our way to the Riviera. I
well remember leaving London at 7 a.m. on a January morning, in the
densest of fogs. So thick was the fog that the footman had to lead the
horses all the way to Charing Cross Station. Ten hours later I found
myself in a fairy city of clean white stone houses, literally blazing
with light. I had never imagined such a beautiful, attractive place,
and indeed the contrast between the dismal London of the "sixties" and
this brilliant, glittering town was unbelievable. Paris certainly
deserved the title of "La Ville Lumiere" in a literal sense. I like the
French expression, "une ville ruisselante de lumiere," "a city dripping
with light." That is an apt description of the Paris of the Second
Empire, for it was hardly a manufacturing city then, and the great rim
of outlying factories that now besmirch the white stone of its house
fronts had not come into existence, the atmosphere being as clear as in
the country. A naturally retentive memory is apt to store up perfectly
useless items of information. What possible object can there be to my
remembering that the engine which hauled us from Calais to Paris in
1865 was built by J. Cail of Paris, on the "Crampton" system; that is,
that the axle of the big single driving-wheels did not run under the
frame of the engine, but passed through the "cab" immediately under the
pressure-gauge?--nor can any useful purpose be served in recalling that
we crossed the Channel in the little steamer La France.

In those days people of a certain class in England maintained far
closer social relations with people of the corresponding class in
France than is the custom now, and this was mutual. Society in both
capitals was far smaller. My father and mother had many friends in
Paris, and amongst the oldest of them were the Comte and Comtesse de
Flahault. General de Flahault had been the personal aide-de-camp and
trusted friend of Napoleon I. Some people, indeed, declared that his
connection with Napoleon III. was of a far closer nature, for his great
friendship with Queen Hortense was a matter of common knowledge. For
some reason or another the old General took a fancy to me, and finding
that I could talk French fluently, he used to take me to his room,
stuff me with chocolate, and tell me about Napoleon's Russian campaign
in 1812, in which he had taken part, I was then seven years old, and
the old Comte must have been seventy-eight or so, but it is curious
that I should have heard from the actual lips of a man who had taken
part in it, the account of the battle of Borodino, of the entry of the
French troops into Moscow, of the burning of Moscow, and of the awful
sufferings the French underwent during their disastrous retreat from
Moscow. General de Flahault had been present at the terrible carnage of
the crossing of the Beresina on November 26, 1812, and had got both his
feet frost-bitten there, whilst his faithful servant David had died
from the effects of the cold. I wish that I could have been older then,
or have had more historical knowledge, for it was a unique opportunity
for acquiring information. I wish, too, that I could recall more of
what M. de Flahault told me. I have quite vivid recollections of the
old General himself, of the room in which we sat, and especially of the
chocolates which formed so agreeable an accompaniment to our
conversations. Still it remains an interesting link with the Napoleonic
era. This is 1920; that was 1812!

I can never hear Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" without thinking of
General de Flahault. The present Lord Lansdowne is the Comte de
Flahault's grandson.

Nearly fifty years later another interesting link with the past was
forged. I was dining with Prince and Princess Christian of
Schleswig-Holstein at Schomberg House. When the ladies left the room
after dinner, H. R. H. was good enough to ask me to sit next him. Some
train of thought was at work in the Prince's mind, for he suddenly
said, "Do you know that you are sitting next a man who once took
Napoleon I.'s widow, the Empress Marie Louise, in to dinner?" and the
Prince went on to say that as a youth of seventeen he had accompanied
his father on a visit to the Emperor of Austria at Schonbrunn. On the
occasion of a state dinner, one of the Austrian Archdukes became
suddenly indisposed. Sooner than upset all the arrangements, the young
Prince of Schleswig-Holstein was given the ex-Empress to lead in to
dinner.

I must again repeat that this is 1920. Napoleon married Marie Louise in
1810.

Both my younger brother and I were absolutely fascinated by Paris, its
streets and public gardens. As regards myself, something of the glamour
of those days still remains; Paris is not quite to me as other towns,
and I love its peculiar smell, which a discriminating nose would
analyse as one-half wood-smoke, one-quarter roasting coffee, and
one-quarter drains. During the eighteen years of the Second Empire,
Paris reached a height of material prosperity and of dazzling
brilliance which she has never known before nor since. The undisputed
social capital of Europe, the equally undisputed capital of literature
and art, the great pleasure-city of the world, she stood alone and
without a rival. "La Ville Lumiere!" My mother remembered the Paris of
her youth as a place of tortuous, abominably paved, dimly lit streets,
poisoned with atrocious smells; this glittering town of palaces and
broad white avenues was mainly the creation of Napoleon III. himself,
aided by Baron Georges Haussmann and the engineer Adolphe Alphand, who
between them evolved and made the splendid Paris that we know.

We loved the Tuileries gardens, a most attractive place for children in
those days. There were swings and merry-go-rounds; there were stalls
where hot brioches and gaufres were to be bought; there were, above
all, little marionette theatres where the most fascinating dramas were
enacted. Our enjoyment of these performances was rather marred by our
anxious nurse, who was always terrified lest there should be "something
French" in the little plays; something quite unfitted for the eyes and
ears of two staid little Britons. As the worthy woman was a most
indifferent French scholar, we were often hurried away quite
unnecessarily from the most innocuous performances when our faithful
watch-dog scented the approach of "something French." All the shops
attracted us, but especially the delightful toy-shops. Here, again, we
were seldom allowed to linger, our trusty guardian being obsessed with
the idea that the toy-shops might include amongst their wares
"something French." She was perfectly right; there WAS often something
"very French," but my brother and I had always seen it and noted it
before we were moved off from the windows.

I wonder if any "marchands de coco" still survive in Paris. "Coco" had
nothing to do with cocoa, but was a most mawkish beverage compounded
principally of liquorice and water. The attraction about it lay in the
great tank the vendor carried strapped to his back. This tank was
covered with red velvet and gold tinsel, and was surmounted with a
number of little tinkling silver bells. In addition to that, the
"marchand de coco" carried all over him dozens of silver goblets, or,
at all events, goblets that looked like silver, in which he handed out
his insipid brew. Who would not long to drink out of a silver cup a
beverage that flowed out of a red and gold tank, covered with little
silver bells, be it never so mawkish?

The gardens of the Luxembourg were, if anything, even more attractive
than the Tuileries gardens.

Another delightful place for children was the Hippodrome, long since
demolished and built over. It was a huge open-air stadium, where, in
addition to ordinary circus performances, there were chariot-races and
gladiatorial combats. The great attraction of the Hippodrome was that
all the performers were driven into the arena in a real little
Cinderella gilt coach, complete with four little ponies, a diminutive
coachman, and two tiny little footmen.

Talking of Cinderella, I always wonder that no one has pointed out the
curious mistake the original translator of this story fell into. If any
one will take the trouble to consult Perrault's Cendrillon in the
original French, he or she will find that Cinderella went to the ball
with her feet encased in "des pantoufles de vair." Now, vair means grey
or white fur, ermine or miniver. The word is now obsolete, though it
still survives in heraldry. The translator, misled by the similarity of
sound between "vair" and "verre," rendered it "glass" instead of
"ermine," and Cinderella's glass slippers have become a British
tradition. What would "Cinderella" be as a pantomime without the scene
where she triumphantly puts on her glass slipper? And yet, a little
reflection would show that it would be about as easy to dance in a pair
of glass slippers as it would in a pair of fisherman's waders.

I remember well seeing Napoleon III. and the Empress Eugenie driving
down the Rue de Rivoli on their return from the races at Longchamp. I
and my brother were standing close to the edge of the pavement, and
they passed within a few feet of us. They were driving in a
char-a-banes--in French parlance, "attele a la Daumont"--that is, with
four horses, of which the wheelers are driven from the box by a
coachman, and the leaders ridden by a postilion. The Emperor and
Empress were attended by an escort of mounted Cent-Gardes, and over the
carriage there was a curious awning of light blue silk, with a heavy
gold fringe, probably to shield the occupants from the sun at the
races. I thought the Emperor looked very old and tired, but the Empress
was still radiantly beautiful. My young brother, even then a bigoted
little patriot, obstinately refused to take off his cap. "He isn't MY
Emperor," he kept repeating, "and I won't do it." The shrill cries of
"Vive l'Empereur!" seemed to me a very inadequate substitute for the
full-throated cheers with which our own Queen was received when she
drove through London. I used to hear the Emperor alluded to as
"Badinguet" by the hall-porter of our hotel, who was a Royalist, and
consequently detested the Bonapartes.

My father had been on very friendly terms with Napoleon III., then
Prince Louis Napoleon, during the period of his exile in London in
1838, when he lived in King Street, St. James'. Prince Louis Napoleon
acted as my father's "Esquire" at the famous Eglinton Tournament in
August, 1839. The tournament, over which such a vast amount of trouble
and expense had been lavished, was ruined by an incessant downpour of
rain, which lasted four days. My father gave me as a boy the "Challenge
Shield" with coat of arms, which hung outside his tent at the
tournament, and that shield has always accompanied me in my wanderings.
It hangs within a few feet of me as I write, as it hung forty-three
years ago in my room in Berlin, and later in Petrograd, Lisbon, and
Buenos Ayres.

One of the great sights of Paris in the "sixties," whilst it was still
gas-lighted, was the "cordon de lumiere de la Rue de Rivoli." As every
one knows, the Rue de Rivoli is nearly two miles long, and runs
perfectly straight, being arcaded throughout its length. In every arch
of the arcades there hung then a gas lamp. At night the continuous
ribbon of flame from these lamps, stretching in endless vista down the
street, was a fascinatingly beautiful sight. Every French provincial
who visited Paris was expected to admire the "cordon de lumiere de la
Rue de Rivoli." Now that electricity has replaced gas, I fancy that the
lamps are placed further apart, and so the effect of a continuous
quivering band of yellow flame is lost. Equally every French provincial
had to admire the "luxe de gaz" of the Place de la Concorde. It
certainly blazed with gas, but now with electric arc-lamps there is
double the light with less than a tenth of the number of old flickering
gas-lamps; another example of quality vs. quantity.

Most of my father and mother's French friends lived in the Faubourg
Saint Germain. Their houses, though no doubt very fine for
entertaining, were dark and gloomy in the daytime. Our little friends
of my own age seemed all to inhabit dim rooms looking into courtyards,
where, however, we were bidden to unbelievably succulent repasts, very
different to the plain fare to which we were accustomed at home. Both
my brother and myself were, I think, unconscious as to whether we were
speaking English or French; we could express ourselves with equal
facility in either language. When I first went to school, I could speak
French as well as English, and it is a wonderful tribute to the
efficient methods of teaching foreign languages practised in our
English schools, that at the end of nine years of French lessons, both
at a preparatory school and at Harrow, I had not forgotten much more
than seventy-five per cent. of the French I knew when I went there. In
the same way, after learning German at Harrow for two-and-a-half years,
my linguistic attainments in that language were limited to two words,
ja and nein. It is true that, for some mysterious reason, German was
taught us at Harrow by a Frenchman who had merely a bowing
acquaintanceship with the tongue.

In 1865 the fastest train from Paris to the Riviera took twenty-six
hours to accomplish the journey, and then was limited to first-class
passengers. There were, of course, neither dining-cars nor sleeping
cars, no heating, and no toilet accommodation. Eight people were jammed
into a first-class compartment, faintly lit by the dim flicker of an
oil-lamp, and there they remained. I remember that all the French
ladies took off their bonnets or hats, and replaced them with thick
knitted woollen hoods and capes combined, which they fastened tightly
round their heads. They also drew on knitted woollen over-boots; these,
I suppose, were remnants of the times, not very far distant then, when
all-night journeys had frequently to be made in the diligence.

The Riviera of 1865 was not the garish, flamboyant rendezvous of
cosmopolitan finance, of ostentatious newly acquired wealth, and of
highly decorative ladies which it has since become. Cannes, in
particular, was a quiet little place of surpassing beauty, frequented
by a few French and English people, most of whom were there on account
of some delicate member of their families. We went there solely because
my sister, Lady Mount Edgcumbe, had already been attacked by
lung-disease, and to prolong her life it was absolutely necessary for
her to winter in a warm climate. Lord Brougham, the ex-Lord Chancellor,
had virtually created Cannes, as far as English people were concerned,
and the few hotels there were still unpretentious and comfortable.

Amongst the French boys of our own age with whom we played daily was
Antoine de Mores, eldest son of the Duc de Vallombrosa. Later on in
life the Marquis de Mores became a fanatical Anglophobe, and he lost
his life leading an army of irregular Arab cavalry against the British
forces in the Sudan; murdered, if I remember rightly, by his own men.
Most regretfully do I attribute Antoine de Mores' violent Anglophobia
to the very rude things I and my brother were in the habit of saying to
him when we quarrelled, which happened on an average about four times a
day.

The favourite game of these French boys was something like our "King of
the Castle," only that the victor had to plant his flag on the summit
of the "Castle." Amongst our young friends were the two sons of the Duc
Des Cars, a strong Legitimist, the Vallombrosa boy's family being
Bonapartists. So whilst my brother and I naturally carried "Union
Jacks," young Antoine de Mores had a tricolour, but the two Des Cars
boys carried white silk flags, with a microscopic border of blue and
red ribbon running down either side. One day, as boys will do, we
marched through the town in procession with our flags, when the police
stopped us and seized the young Des Cars' white banners, the display of
the white flag of the Bourbons being then strictly forbidden in France.
The Des Cars boys' abbe, or priest-tutor, pointed out to the police the
narrow edging of red and blue on either side, and insisted on it that
the flags were really tricolours, though the proportion in which the
colours were displayed might be an unusual one. The three colours were
undoubtedly there, so the police released the flags, though I feel sure
that that abbe must have been a Jesuit.

The Comte de Chambord (the Henri V. of the Legitimists) was virtually
offered the throne of France in either 1874 or 1875, but all the
negotiations failed because he obstinately refused to recognise the
Tricolour, and insisted upon retaining the white flag of his ancestors.
Any one with the smallest knowledge of the psychology of the French
nation must have known that under no circumstances whatever would they
consent to abandon their adored Tricolour. The Tricolour is part of
themselves: it is a part of their very souls; it is more than a flag,
it is almost a religion. I wonder that in 1875 it never occurred to any
one to suggest to the Comte de Chambord the ingenious expedient of the
Des Cars boys. The Tricolour would be retained as the national flag,
but the King could have as his personal standard a white flag bordered
with almost invisible bands of blue and red. Technically, it would
still be a tricolour, and on the white expanse the golden fleur-de-lys
of the Bourbons could be embroidered, or any other device.

Even had the Comte de Chambord ascended the throne, I am convinced that
his tenure of it as Henri V. would have been a very brief one, given
the temperament of the French nation.

My youngest brother managed to contract typhoid fever at Cannes about
this time, and during his convalescence he was moved to an hotel
standing on much higher ground than our villa, on account of the
fresher air there. A Madame Goldschmidt was staying at this hotel, and
she took a great fancy to the little fellow, then about six years old.
On two occasions I found Madame Goldschmidt in my brother's room,
singing to him in a voice as sweet and spontaneous as a bird's. My
brother was a very highly favoured little mortal, for Madame
Goldschmidt was no other than the world-famous Jenny Lind, the
incomparable songstress who had had all Europe at her feet. She had
then retired from the stage for some years, but her voice was as sweet
as ever. The nineteenth century was fortunate in having produced two
such peerless singers as Adelina Patti and Jenny Lind, "the Swedish
Nightingale." The present generation are not likely to hear their
equals. Both these great singers had that same curious bird-like
quality in their voices; they sang without any effort in crystal-clear
tones, as larks sing.

In 1865 it was announced that there would be a great regatta at Cannes
in the spring of 1866, and that the Emperor Napoleon would give a
special prize for the open rowing (not sculling) championship of the
Mediterranean. We further learnt that the whole of the French
Mediterranean fleet would be at Villefranche at the time, and that
picked oarsmen from the fleet would compete for the championship. My
father at once determined to win this prize; the idea became a perfect
obsession with him, and he determined to have a special boat built.
When we returned to England, he went to Oxford and entered into long
consultations with a famous boat-builder there. The boat, a four-oar,
had to be built on special lines. She must be light and fast, yet
capable of withstanding a heavy sea, for off Cannes the Mediterranean
can be very lumpy indeed, and it would be obviously inconvenient to
have the boat swamped, and her crew all drowned. The boat-builder
having mastered the conditions, felt certain that he could turn out the
craft required, which my father proposed to stroke himself.

When we returned to Cannes in 1866, the completed boat was sent out by
sea, and we saw her released from her casing with immense interest. She
was christened in due form, with a bottle of champagne, by our first
cousin, the venerable Lady de Ros, and named the Abercorn. Lady de Ros
was a daughter of the Duke of Richmond, and had been present at the
famous ball in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo in 1815; a ball given by
her father in honour of her youngest sister.

The crew then went into serious training. Bow was Sir David Erskine,
for many years Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons; No. 2, my
brother-in-law, Lord Mount Edgcumbe; No. 3, General Sir George
Higginson, with my father as stroke. Lord Elphinstone, who had been in
the Navy early in life, officiated as coxswain. But my father was then
fifty-five years old, and he soon found out that his heart was no
longer equal to the strain to which so long and so very arduous a
course (three miles), in rough water, would subject it. As soon as he
realised that his age might militate against the chance of his crew
winning, he resigned his place in the boat in favour of Sir George
Higginson, who was replaced as No. 3 by Mr. Meysey-Clive. My father
took Lord Elphinstone's place as coxswain, but here, again, his weight
told against him. He was over six feet high and proportionately broad,
and he brought the boat's stern too low down in the water, so Lord
Elphinstone was re-installed, and my father most reluctantly had to
content himself with the role of a spectator, in view of his age. The
crew dieted strictly, ran in the mornings, and went to bed early. They
were none of them in their first youth, for Sir George Higginson was
then forty; Sir David Erskine was twenty-eight; my brother-in-law, Lord
Mount Edgcumbe, thirty-four; and Lord Elphinstone thirty-eight.

The great day of the race arrived. We met with one signal piece of
ill-luck. Our No. 3, Mr. Meysey-Clive, had gone on board the French
flagship, and was unable to get ashore again in time, so at the very
last minute a young Oxford rowing-man, the late Mr. Philip Green,
volunteered to replace him, though he was not then in training. The
French men-of-war produced huge thirty-oared galleys, with two men at
each oar. There were also smaller twenty and twelve-oared boats, but
not a single "four" but ours. The sea was heavy and lumpy, the course
was five kilometres (three miles), and there was a fresh breeze blowing
off the land. Our little mahogany Oxford-built boat, lying very low in
the water, looked pitiably small beside the great French galleys. It
wasn't even David and Goliath, it was as though "Little Tich" stood up
to Georges Carpentier. We saw the race from a sailing yacht; my father
absolutely beside himself with excitement.

Off they went! The French galleys lumbering along at a great pace,
their crews pulling a curiously short stroke, and their coxswains
yelling "En avant, mes braves!" with all the strength of their lungs.
It must have been very like the boat-race Virgil describes in the fifth
book of the Aeneid. There was the "huge Chimaera" the "mighty Centaur"
and possibly even the "dark-blue Scylla" with their modern counterparts
of Gyas, Sergestus, and Cloanthus, bawling just as lustily as doubtless
those coxswains of old shouted; no one, however, struck on the rocks,
as we are told the unfortunate "Centaur" did. Still the little
mahogany-built Abercorn continued to forge ahead of her unwieldy French
competitors. The Frenchmen splashed and spurted nobly, but the little
Oxford-built boat increased her lead, her silken "Union Jack" trailing
in the water. All the muscles of the French fleet came into play; the
admiral's barge churned the water into creaming foam; "mes braves" were
incited to superhuman exertions; in spite of it all, the Abercorn shot
past the mark-boat, a winner by a length and a half.

My father was absolutely frantic with delight. We reached the shore
long before our crew did, for they had to return to receive the judge's
formal award. He ceremoniously decorated our boat's bows with a large
laurel-wreath, and so--her stem adorned with laurels, and the large
silk "Union Jack" trailing over her stern--the little mahogany
Oxford-built boat paddled through the lines of her French competitors.
I am sorry to have to record that the French took their defeat in a
most unsportsmanlike fashion; the little Abercorn was received all down
the line with storms of hoots and hisses. Possibly we, too, might feel
annoyed if, say at Portsmouth, in a regatta in which all the crack
oarsmen of the British Home Fleet were competing, a French four should
suddenly appear from nowhere, and walk off with the big prize of the
day. Still, the conditions of the Cannes regatta were clear; this was
an open race, open to any nationality, and to any rowing craft of any
size or build, though the result was thought a foregone certainty for
the French naval crews.

Our crew were terribly exhausted when they landed. They had had a very
very severe pull, in a heavy sea, and with a strong head-wind against
them, and most of them were no longer young; still, after a bath and a
change of clothing, and, quite possibly, a brandy-and-soda or two
(nobody ever drank whisky in the "sixties"), they pulled themselves
together again. It was Lord Mount Edgcumbe who first suggested that as
there was an afternoon dance that day at the Cercle Nautique de la
Mediterranee, they should all adjourn to the club and dance vigorously,
just to show what sturdy, hard-bitten dogs they were, to whom a
strenuous three-mile pull in a heavy sea was a mere trifle, even though
some of them were forty years old. So off we all went to the Cercle,
and I well remember seeing my brother-in-law and Sir George Higginson
gyrating wildly and ceaselessly round the ball-room, tired out though
they were. Between ourselves, our French friends were immensely
impressed with this exhibition of British vigour, and almost forgave
our boat for having won the rowing championship of the Mediterranean.

At the Villa Beaulieu where we lived, there were immense rejoicings
that night. Of course all our crew dined there, and I was allowed to
come down to dinner myself. Toasts were proposed; healths were drunk
again and again. Speeches were made, and the terrific cheering must
have seriously weakened the rafters and roof of the house. No one
grudged my father his immense satisfaction, for after all he had
originated the idea of winning the championship of the Mediterranean,
and had had the boat built at his sole expense, and it was not his
defects as an oarsman but his fifty-five years which had prevented him
from stroking his own boat.

Long after I had been sent to bed, I heard the uproar from below
continuing, and, in the strictest confidence, I have every reason to
believe that they made a real night of it.

Two of that crew are still alive. Gallant old Sir George Higginson was
born in 1826, consequently the General is now ninety-four years of age.
The splendid old veteran's mental faculties are as acute as ever; he is
not afflicted with deafness and he is still upright as a dart, though
his eyesight has failed him. It is to Sir George and to Sir David
Erskine that I am indebted for the greater portion of the details
concerning this boat-race of 1866, and of its preliminaries, for many
of these would not have come within the scope of my knowledge at nine
years of age.

Sir David Erskine, the other member of the crew still surviving,
ex-Sergeant-at-Arms, was a most familiar, respected, and greatly
esteemed personality to all those who have sat in the House of Commons
during the last forty years. I might perhaps have put it more strongly;
for he was invariably courteous, and such a great gentleman. Sir David
was born in 1838, consequently he is now eighty-two years old.

One of my brothers has still in his keeping a very large gold medal.
One side of it bears the effigy of "Napoleon III., Empereur des
Francais." The other side testifies that it is the "Premier Prix
d'Avirons de la Mediterrannee, 1866." The ugly hybrid word
"Championnat" for "Championship" had not then been acclimatised in
France.

Shortly after the boat-race, being now nine years old, I went home to
England to go to school.




CHAPTER III


A new departure--A Dublin hotel in the "sixties"--The Irish mail
service--The wonderful old paddle mail-boats--The convivial waiters of
the Munster--The Viceregal Lodge-Indians and pirates--The imagination
of youth--A modest personal ambition--Death-warrants; imaginary and
real--The Fenian outbreak of 1866-7--The Abergele railway accident--A
Dublin Drawing-Room--Strictly private ceremonials--Some of the
amenities of the Chapel Royal--An unbidden spectator of the State
dinners--Irish wit--Judge Keogh--Father Healy--Happy Dublin knack of
nomenclature--An unexpected honour and its cause--Incidents of the
Fenian rising--Dr. Hatchell--A novel prescription--Visit of King
Edward--Gorgeous ceremonial but a chilly drive--An anecdote of Queen
Alexandra.


Upon returning from school for my first holidays, I learnt that my
father had been appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and that we were
in consequence to live now for the greater portion of the year in
Dublin.

We were all a little doubtful as to how we should like this new
departure. Dublin was, of course, fairly familiar to us from our stays
there, when we travelled to and from the north of Ireland. Some of the
minor customs of the "sixties" seem so remote now that it may be worth
while recalling them. In common with most Ulster people, we always
stayed at the Bilton Hotel in Dublin, a fine old Georgian house in
Sackville Street. Everything at the Bilton was old, solid, heavy, and
eminently respectable. All the plate was of real Georgian silver, and
all the furniture in the big gloomy bedrooms was of solid, not
veneered, mahogany. Quite invariably my father was received in the
hall, on arrival, by the landlord, with a silver candlestick in his
hand. The landlord then proceeded ceremoniously to "light us upstairs"
to a sitting-room on the first floor, although the staircase was bright
with gas. This was a survival from the eighteenth century, when
staircases and passages in inns were but dimly lit; but it was an
attention that was expected. In the same way, when dinner was ready in
our sitting-room, the landlord always brought in the silver soup-tureen
with his own hands, placed it ceremoniously before my father, and
removed the cover with a great flourish; after which he retired, and
left the rest to the waiter. This was another traditional attention.

Towards the end of dinner it became my father's turn to repay these
civilities. Though he himself very rarely touched wine, he would look
down the wine-list until he found a peculiarly expensive port. This he
would order for what was then termed "the good of the house." When this
choice product of the Bilton bins made its appearance, wreathed in
cobwebs, in a wicker cradle, my father would send the waiter with a
message to the landlord, "My compliments to Mr. Massingberg, and will
he do me the favour of drinking a glass of wine with me." So the
landlord would reappear, and, sitting down opposite my father, they
would solemnly dispose of the port, and let us trust that it never gave
either of them the faintest twinge of gout. These little mutual
attentions were then expected on both sides. Neither my father nor
mother ever used the word "hotel" in speaking of any hostelry in the
United Kingdom. Like all their contemporaries, they always spoke of an
"inn."

In 1860 a new contract had been signed with the Post Office by the
London and North-Western Railway and the City of Dublin Steam-Packet
Co., by which they jointly undertook to convey the mails between London
and Dublin in eleven hours. Up to 1860, the time occupied by the
journey was from fourteen to sixteen hours. Everything in this world
being relative, this was rapidity itself compared to the five days my
uncle, Lord John Russell, the future Prime Minister, spent on the
journey in 1806. He was then a schoolboy at Westminster, his father,
the sixth Duke of Bedford, being Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. My uncle,
who kept a diary from his earliest days, gives an account of this
journey in it. He spent three days going by stage-coach to Holyhead,
sleeping on the way at Coventry and Chester, and thirty-eight hours
crossing the Channel in a sailing-packet. The wind shifting, the packet
had to land her passengers at Balbriggan, twenty-one miles north of
Dublin, from which my uncle took a special post-chaise to Dublin,
presenting his glad parents, on his arrival, with a bill for L31 16s.,
a nice fare for a boy of fourteen to pay for going home for his
holidays!

In order to fulfil the terms of the 1860 contract, the mail-trains had
to cover the 264 miles between London and Holyhead at an average rate
of 42 miles per hour; an unprecedented speed in those days. People then
thought themselves most heroic in entrusting their lives to a train
that travelled with such terrific velocity as the "Wild Irishman." It
was to meet this acceleration that Mr. Ramsbottom, the Locomotive
Superintendent of the London and North-Western Railway, devised a
scheme for laying water-troughs between the rails, by which the engine
could pick up water through a scoop whilst running. I have somewhere
seen this claimed as an American innovation, but the North-Western
engines have been picking up water daily now ever since 1861; nearly
sixty years ago.

The greatest improvement, however, was effected in the cross-Channel
passage. To accomplish the sixty-five miles between Holyhead and
Kingstown in the contract time of four hours, the City of Dublin Co.
built four paddle-vessels, far exceeding any cross-Channel steamer then
afloat in tonnage, speed and accommodation. They were over three
hundred feet in length, of two thousand tons burden, and had a speed of
fifteen knots. Of these the Munster, Connaught, and Ulster were built
by Laird of Birkenhead, while the Leinster was built in London by
Samuda. These boats were most elaborately and comfortably fitted up,
and many people of my age, who were in the habit of travelling
constantly to Ireland, retain a feeling of almost personal affection
for those old paddle-wheel mailboats which carried them so often in
safety across St. George's Channel. It is possible that this feeling
may be stronger in those who, like myself, are unaffected by
sea-sickness. I think that we all took a pride in the finest Channel
steamers then afloat, and, as a child, I was always conscious of a
little added dignity and an extra ray of reflected glory when crossing
in the Leinster or the Connaught, for they had four funnels each. I
think that I am correct in saying that these splendid seaboats never
missed one single passage, whatever the weather, for nearly forty
years, until they were superseded by the present three thousand tons,
twenty-four knot twin-screw boats. The old paddle-wheelers were
rejuvenated in 1883, when they were fitted with forced draught, and
their paddles were submerged deeper, giving them an extra speed of two
knots. Their engines being "simple," they consumed a perfectly ruinous
amount of coal, sixty-four tons for the round trip; considerably more
than the coal consumption of the present twenty-four knotters.

In the "sixties" a new Lord-Lieutenant crossed in a special
mail-steamer, for which he had the privilege of paying.

When my father went over to be sworn-in, we arrived at Holyhead in the
evening, and on going on board the special steamer Munster, we found a
sumptuous supper awaiting us.

There is an incident connected with that supper of which, of course, I
knew nothing at the time, but which was told me more than thirty years
after by Mrs. Campbell, the comely septuagenarian head-stewardess of
the Munster, who had been in the ship for forty-four years. Most
habitual travelers to Ireland will cherish very kindly recollections of
genial old Mrs. Campbell, with her wonderfully fresh complexion and her
inexhaustible fund of stories.

It appears that the supper had been supplied by a firm of Dublin
caterers, who sent four of their own waiters with it, much to the
indignation of the steward's staff, who resented this as a slight on
their professional abilities.

Mrs. Campbell told me the story in some such words as these:

"About ten minutes before your father, the new Lord-Lieutenant, was
expected, the chiefs-steward put his head into the ladies' cabin and
called out to me, 'Mrs. Campbell, ma'am! For the love of God come into
the saloon this minute.' 'What is it, then, Mr. Murphy?' says I. 'Wait
till ye see,' says he. So I go into the saloon where there was the
table set out for supper, so grand that ye wouldn't believe it, and
them four Dublin waiters was all lying dead-drunk on the saloon floor.

"'I put out the spirit decanters on the supper-table,' says Mr. Murphy,
'and see! Them Dublin waiters have every drop of it drunk on me,' he
goes on, showing me the empty decanters. 'They have three bottles of
champagne drunk on me besides. What will we do with them now? The new
Lord Lieutenant may be arriving this minute, and we have no time to
move the drunk waiters for'ard. Will we put them in the little
side-cabins here?' 'Ah then!' says I, 'and have them roaring and
shouting, and knocking the place down maybe in half an hour or so? I'm
surprised at ye, Mr. Murphy. We'll put the drunk waiters under the
saloon table, and you must get another table-cloth. We'll pull it down
on both sides, the way the feet of them will not show." So I call up
two stewards and the boys from the pantry, and we get the drunk waiters
arranged as neat as herrings in a barrel under the saloon table. Mr.
Murphy and I put on the second cloth, pulling it right down to the
floor, and ye wouldn't believe the way we worked, setting out the
dishes, and the flowers and the swatemates on the table. 'Now,' says I,
'for the love of God let none of them sit down at the table, or they'll
feel the waiters with their feet. Lave it to me to get His Excellency
out of this, and then hurry the drunk waiters away!' And I spoke a word
to the boys in the pantry. 'Boys,' says I, 'as ye value your salvation,
keep up a great clatteration here by dropping the spoons and forks
about, the way they'll not hear it if the drunk waiters get snoring,'
and then the thrain arrives, and we run up to meet His Excellency your
father.

"We went down to the saloon for a moment, and every one says that they
never saw the like of that for a supper, the boys in the pantry keeping
up such a clatteration by tumbling the spoons and forks about, that
ye'd think the bottom of the ship would drop out with the noise of it
all. Then I said, 'Supper will not be ready for ten minutes, your
Excellency'--though God forgive me if every bit of it was not on the
table that minute. 'Would you kindly see if the sleeping accommodation
is commodious enough, for we'll alter it if it isn't?' and so I get
them all out of that, and I kept talking of this, and of that, the Lord
only knows what, till Mr. Murphy comes up and says, 'Supper is ready,
your Excellency,' giving me a look out of the tail of his eye as much
as to say, 'Glory be! We have them drunk waiters safely out of that.'"

Of course I knew nothing of the convivial waiters, but I retain vivid
recollections of the splendours of the supper-table, and of the
"swatemates," for I managed to purloin a whole pocketful of preserved
ginger and other good things from it, without being noticed.

We arrived at Kingstown in the early morning, and anchored in the
harbour, but, by a polite fiction, the Munster was supposed to be
absolutely invisible to ordinary eyes, for the new Lord-Lieutenant's
official time of arrival from England was 11 a.m. Accordingly, every
one being arrayed in their very best for the State entry into Dublin,
the Munster got up steam and crept out of the harbour (still, of
course, completely invisible), to cruise about a little, and to
re-enter the harbour (obviously direct from England) amidst the booming
of twenty-one guns from the guardship, a vast display of bunting, and a
tornado of cheering.

Unfortunately, it had come on to blow; there was a very heavy sea
outside, and the Munster had an unrivalled opportunity for showing off
her agility, and of exhibiting her unusual capacity for pitching and
rolling. My youngest brother and I have never been affected by
sea-sickness; the ladies, however, had a very unpleasing half-hour,
though it must be rather a novel and amusing experience to succumb to
this malady when arrayed in the very latest creations of a Paris
dressmaker and milliner; still I fear that neither my mother nor my
sisters can have been looking quite their best when we landed amidst an
incredible din of guns, whistles and cheering.

My father, as was the custom then, made his entry into Dublin on
horseback. Since he had to keep his right hand free to remove his hat
every minute or so, in acknowledgment of his welcome, and as his horse
got alarmed by the noise, the cheering, and the waving of flags, he
managed to give a very pretty exhibition of horsemanship.

By the way, Irish cheering is a thing sui generis. In place of the
deep-throated, reverberating English cheer, it is a long, shrill,
sustained note, usually very high-pitched.

The State entry into Dublin was naturally the first occasion on which I
had ever driven through streets lined with soldiers and gay with
bunting. If I remember right, I accepted most of it as a tribute to my
own small person.

On arriving at the Viceregal Lodge in the Phoenix Park, my brother and
I were much relieved at finding that we were not expected to live
perpetually surrounded by men in full uniform and by ladies in smart
dresses, as we had gathered that we were fated to do during the
morning's ceremonies at Dublin Castle.

The Viceregal Lodge is a large, unpretentious, but most comfortable
house, standing in really beautiful grounds. The 160 acres of its
enclosure have been laid out with such skill as to appear to the eye
double or treble the extent they actually are. The great attraction to
my brother and me lay in a tract of some ten acres of woodland which
had been allowed to run entirely wild. We soon peopled this very
satisfactorily with two tribes of Red Indians, two bands of peculiarly
bloodthirsty robbers, a sufficiency of bears, lions and tigers, and an
appalling man-eating dragon. I fear that in view of the size of the
little wood, these imported inhabitants must have had rather cramped
quarters.

The enacting of the role of a Red Indian "brave" was necessarily a
little fatiguing, for according to Fenimore Cooper, our guide in these
matters, it was essential to keep up an uninterrupted series of
guttural grunts of "Ug! Ug!" the invariable manner in which his
"braves" prefaced their remarks.

There was perhaps little need for the imaginary menagerie, for the
Dublin Zoological Gardens adjoined the "Lodge" grounds, and were
accessible to us at any time with a private key. The Dublin Zoo had
always been very successful in breeding lions, and derived a large
amount of their income from the sale of the cubs. They consequently
kept a number of lions, and the roaring of these lions at night was
very audible at the Viceregal Lodge, only a quarter of a mile away.
When I told the boys at school, with perfect truth, that in Dublin I
was nightly lulled to sleep by the gentle roaring of lions round my
couch, I was called a young liar.

There is a pretty lake inside the Viceregal grounds. My two elder
brothers were certain that they had seen wild duck on this lake in the
early morning, so getting up in the dusk of a December morning, they
crept down to the lake with their guns. With the first gleam of dawn,
they saw that there were plenty of wild fowl on the water, and they
succeeded in shooting three or four of them. When daylight came, they
retrieved them with a boat, but were dismayed at finding that these
birds were neither mallards, nor porchards, nor any known form of
British duck; their colouring, too, seemed strangely brilliant. Then
they remembered the neighbouring Zoo, with its ornamental ponds covered
with rare imported and exotic waterfowl, and they realised what they
had done. It is quite possible that they had killed some unique
specimens, imported at fabulous cost from Central Africa, or from the
heart of the Australian continent, some priceless bird that was the
apple of the eye of the Curator of the Gardens, so we buried the
episode and the birds, in profound secrecy.

For my younger brother and myself, this lake had a different
attraction, for, improbable as it may seem, it was the haunt of a gang
of most abandoned pirates. Behind a wooded island, but quite invisible
to the adult eye, the pirate craft lay, conforming in the most orthodox
fashion to the descriptions in Ballantyne's books: "a schooner with a
long, low black hull, and a suspicious rake to her masts. The copper on
her bottom had been burnished till it looked like gold, and the black
flag, with the skull and cross-bones, drooped lazily from her peak."

The presence of this band of desperadoes entailed the utmost caution
and watchfulness in the neighbourhood of the lake. Unfortunately, we
nearly succeeded in drowning some young friends of ours, whom we
persuaded to accompany us in an attack on the pirates' stronghold. We
embarked on a raft used for cutting weeds, but no sooner had we shoved
off than the raft at once, most inconsiderately, sank to the bottom of
the lake with us. Being Christmas time, the water was not over-warm,
and we had some difficulty in extricating our young friends. Their
parents made the most absurd fuss about their sons having been forced
to take a cold bath in mid-December in their best clothes. Clearly we
could not be held responsible for the raft failing to prove sea-worthy,
though my youngest brother, even then a nice stickler for correct
English, declared, that, given the circumstances, the proper epithet
was "lake-worthy."

What a wonderful dream-world the child can create for himself, and
having fashioned it and peopled it, he can inhabit his creation in
perfect content quite regardless of his material surroundings, unless
some grown-up, with his matter-of-fact bluntness, happens to break the
spell.

I have endeavoured to express this peculiar faculty of the child's in
rather halting blank verse. I apologise for giving it here, as I make
no claim to be able to write verse. My only excuse must be that my
lines attempt to convey what every man and woman must have felt, though
probably the average person would express himself in far better
language than I am able to command.

    "Eheu fugaces Postume! Postume!
    Labuntur anni.

    "The memories of childhood are a web
    Of gossamer, most infinitely frail
    And tender, shot with gleaming threads of gold
    And silver, through the iridescent weft
    Of subtlest tints of azure and of rose;
    Woven of fragile nothings, yet most dear,
    As binding us to that dim, far-off time,
    When first our lungs inhaled the fragrance sweet
    Of a new world, where all was bright and fair.
    As we approach the end of mortal things,
    The band of comrades ever smaller grows;
    For those who have not shared our trivial round,
    Nor helped with us to forge its many links,
    Can only listen with dull, wearied mind.
    Some few there are on whom the gods bestowed
    The priceless gift of sympathy, and they,
    Though knowing not themselves, yet understand.
    So guard the fragile fabric rolled away
    In the sweet-scented chests of memory,
    Careful lest one uncomprehending soul
    Should, thoughtless, rend the filmy texture frail
    Into a thousand fragments, and destroy
    The precious relic of the golden dawn
    Of life, when all the unknown future lay
    Bathed in unending sunlight, and the heights
    Of manhood, veiled in distant purple haze,
    Offered ten thousand chances of success.
    But why the future, when the present seemed
    A flower-decked meadow in eternal spring?
    When every woodland glade its secrets told
    To us, and us alone. The grown-up eye
    Saw sun-flecked oaks, and tinkling, fern-fringed stream,
    Nor knew that 'neath their shade most doughty Knights
    Daily rode forth to deeds of chivalry;
    And ruthless ruffians waged relentless war
    On those who strayed (without the Talisman
    Which turned their fury into impotence)
    Into those leafy depths nor dreamed there lurked
    Concealed amidst the bosky dells unseen,
    Grim dragons spouting instant death; nor feared
    The placid lake, along whose reed-fringed shore
    Bold Buccaneers swooped down upon their prey.
    Which things were hidden from maturer eyes.
    To those who breathed the freshness of the morn,
    Endless romance; to others, common things.
    For to the Child is given to spin a web
    Of golden glamour o'er the everyday.

    Happy is he who can, in spite of years,
    Retain at times the spirit of the Child."

My own personal ambition at that period was a modest one. My mother
always drove out in Dublin in a carriage-and-four, with postilions and
two out-riders. We had always used black carriage-horses, and East, the
well-known job-master, had provided us for Dublin with twenty-two
splendid blacks, all perfect matches. Our family colour being crimson,
the crimson barouche, with the six blacks and our own black and crimson
liveries, made a very smart turn-out indeed. O'Connor, the
wheeler-postilion, a tiny little wizened elderly man, took charge of
the carriage, and directed the outriders at turnings by a code of sharp
whistles. It was my consuming ambition to ride leader-postilion to my
mother's carriage, and above all to wear the big silver coat-of-arms
our postilions had strapped to the left sleeves of their short jackets
on a broad crimson band. I went to O'Connor in the stable-yard, and
consulted him as to my chance of obtaining the coveted berth. O'Connor
was distinctly encouraging. He thought nine rather young for a
postilion, but when I had grown a little, and had gained more
experience, he saw no insuperable objections to my obtaining the post.
The leader-postilion was O'Connor's nephew, a smart-looking,
light-built boy of seventeen, named Byrne. Byrne was less hopeful about
my chance. He assured me that such a rare combination of physical and
intellectual qualities were required for a successful leader-rider,
that it was but seldom that they were found, as in his case, united in
the same person. That my mother had met with no accident whilst driving
was solely due to his own consummate skill, and his wonderful presence
of mind. Little Byrne, however, was quite affable, and allowed me to
try on his livery, including the coveted big silver arm-badge and his
top-boots. In my borrowed plumes I gave the stablemen to understand
that I was as good as engaged already as postilion. Byrne informed me
of some of the disadvantages of the position. "The heart in ye would be
broke at all the claning them leathers requires." I was also told that
after an extra long drive, "ye'd come home that tired that ye'd be
thinking ye were losing your life, and not knowing if ye had a leg left
to ye at all."

I often drove with my mother, and when we had covered more ground than
usual, upon arriving home, I always ran round to the leaders to inquire
anxiously if my friend little Byrne "had a leg left to him, or if he
had lost his life," and was much relieved at finding him sitting on his
horse in perfect health, with his normal complement of limbs encased in
white leathers. I believe that I expected his legs to drop off on the
road from sheer fatigue.

I knew, of course, that the Lord-Lieutenant had to confirm all
death-sentences in Ireland. From much reading of Harrison Ainsworth, I
insisted on calling the documents connected with this,
"death-warrants." I begged and implored my father to let me see a
"death-warrant." He told me that there was nothing to see, but I went
on insisting, until one day he told me that I might see one of these
gruesome documents. To avoid any misplaced sympathy with the condemned
man, I may say that it was a peculiarly brutal murder. A man at Cork
had kicked his wife to death, and had then battered her into a
shapeless mass with the poker. I went into my father's study on the
tip-toe of expectation. I pictured the Private Secretary coming in
slowly, probably draped for the occasion in a long black cloak, and
holding a white handkerchief to his eyes. In his hand he would bear an
immense sheet of paper surrounded by a three-inch black border. It
would be headed DEATH in large letters, with perhaps a
skull-and-crossbones below it, and from it would depend three ominous
black seals attached by black ribbons. The Secretary would naturally
hesitate before presenting so awful a document to my father, who, in
his turn, would exhibit a little natural emotion when receiving it. At
that moment my mother, specially dressed in black for the occasion,
would burst into the room, and falling on her knees, with streaming
eyes and outstretched arms, she would plead passionately for the
condemned man's life. My father, at first obdurate, would gradually be
melted by my mother's entreaties. Turning aside to brush away a furtive
and not unmanly tear, he would suddenly tear the death-warrant to
shreds, and taking up another huge placard headed REPRIEVE, he would
quickly fill it in and sign it. He would then hand it to the Private
Secretary, who would instantly start post-haste for Cork. As the
condemned man was being actually conducted to the scaffold, the Private
Secretary would appear, brandishing the liberating document. All then
would be joy, except for the executioner, who would grind his teeth at
being baulked of his prey at the last minute.

That is, at all events, the way it would have happened in a book. As it
was, the Private Secretary came in just as usual, carrying an ordinary
official paper, precisely similar to dozens of other official papers
lying about the room.

"It is the Cork murder case, sir," he said in his everyday voice. "The
sentence has to be confirmed by you."

"A bad business, Dillon," said my father. "I have seen the Chief
Justice about it twice, and I have consulted the Judge who tried the
case, and the Solicitor and the Attorney-General. I am afraid that
there are no mitigating circumstances whatever. I shall certainly
confirm it," and he wrote across the official paper, "Let the law take
its course," and appended his signature, and that was all!

Could anything be more prosaic? What a waste of an unrivalled dramatic
situation.

When I returned home for the Christmas holidays in 1866, the Fenian
rebellion had already broken out. The authorities had reason to believe
that the Vice-regal Lodge would be attacked, and various precautions
had been taken. Both guards and sentries were doubled; four light
field-guns stood in the garden, and a row of gas-lamps had been
installed there. Stands of arms made their appearance in the passages
upstairs, which were patrolled all night by constables in rubber-soled
boots, but the culminating joy to my brother and me lay in the four
loopholes with which the walls of the bed-room we jointly occupied were
pierced. The room projected beyond the front of the main building, and
was accordingly a strategic point, but to have four real loopholes,
closed with wooden shutters, in the walls of our own bedroom was to the
two small urchins a source of immense pride. The boys at school were
hideously jealous of our loopholes when they heard of them, though they
affected to despise any one who, enjoying such undreamed-of
opportunities, had, on his own confession, failed to take advantage of
them, and had never even fired through the loopholes, nor attempted to
kill any one through them.

The Fenians were supposed to have the secret of a mysterious
combustible known as "Greek Fire" which was unquenchable by water. I
think that "Greek Fire" was nothing more or less than ordinary
petroleum, which was practically unknown in Europe in 1866, though from
personal experience I can say that it was well known in 1868, in which
year my mother, three sisters, two brothers and myself narrowly escaped
being burnt to death, when the Irish mail, in which we were travelling,
collided with a goods train loaded with petroleum at Abergele, North
Wales, an accident which resulted in thirty-four deaths.

Terrible as were the results of the Abergele accident, they might have
been more disastrous still, for both lines were torn up, and the up
Irish mail from Holyhead, which would be travelling at a great pace
down the steep bank from Llandulas, was due at any moment. The front
guard of our train had been killed by the collision, and the rear guard
was seriously hurt, so there was no one to give orders. It occurred at
once to my eldest brother, the late Duke, that as the train was
standing on a sharp incline, the uninjured carriages would, if
uncoupled, roll down the hill of their own accord. He and some other
passengers accordingly managed to undo the couplings, and the uninjured
coaches, detached from the burning ones, glided down the incline into
safety. From the half-stunned guard my brother learned that the nearest
signal-box was at Llandulas, a mile away. He ran there at the top of
his speed, and arrived in time to get the up Irish mail and all other
traffic stopped. On his return my brother had a prolonged fainting fit,
as the strain on his heart had been very great. It took the doctors
over an hour to bring him round, and we all thought that he had died.

I was eleven years old at the time, and the shock of the collision, the
sight of the burning coaches, the screams of the women, the wreckage,
and my brother's narrow escape from death, affected me for some little
while afterwards.

It was the custom then for the Lord-Lieutenant to live for three months
of the winter at the Castle, where a ceaseless round of entertainments
went on. The Castle was in the heart of Dublin, and only boasted a dull
little smoke-blackened garden in the place of the charming grounds of
the Lodge, still there was plenty going on there. A band played daily
in the Castle Yard for an hour, there was the daily guard-mounting, and
the air was thick with bugle calls and rattling kettle-drums.

At "Drawing Rooms" it was still the habit for all ladies to be kissed
by the Lord-Lieutenant on being presented to him, and every lady had to
be re-presented to every fresh Viceroy. This imposed an absolute orgy
of compulsory osculation on the unfortunate Lord-Lieutenant, for if
many of the ladies were fresh, young and pretty, the larger proportion
of them were very distinctly the reverse.

There is a very fine white-and-gold throne-room in Dublin, decorated in
the heavy but effective style of George IV., and it certainly compares
very favourably with the one at Buckingham Palace. St. Patrick's Hall,
too, with its elaborate painted ceiling, is an exceedingly handsome
room, as is the Long Gallery. At my father's first Drawing-Room, when I
officiated as page, the perpetual kissing tickled my fancy so, that,
forgetting that to live up to my new white-satin breeches and lace
ruffles I ought to wear an impassive countenance, I absolutely shook,
spluttered and wriggled with laughter. The ceremony appeared to me
interminable, for ten-year-old legs soon get tired, and ten-year-old
eyelids grow very heavy as midnight approaches. When at length it
ended, and my fellow-page was curled up fast asleep on the steps of the
throne in his official finery, in glancing at my father I was amazed to
find him prematurely aged. The powder from eight hundred cheeks and
necks had turned his moustache and beard white; he had to retire to his
room and spend a quarter of an hour washing and brushing the powder
out, before he could take part in the procession through all the
staterooms which in those days preceded supper. My father was still a
remarkably handsome man even at fifty-six years of age, with his great
height and his full curly beard, and I thought my mother, with all her
jewels on, most beautiful, as I am quite sure she was, though only a
year younger than my father.

The great white-and-gold throne-room brilliant with light, the glitter
of the uniforms, and the sparkle of the jewels were attractive from
their very novelty to a ten-year-old schoolboy, perhaps a little
overwhelmed by his own gorgeous and unfamiliar trappings. We two pages
had been ordered to stand quite motionless, one on either side of the
throne, but as the evening wore on and we began to feel sleepy, it was
difficult to carry our instructions into effect, for there were no
facilities for playing even a game of "oughts and crosses" in order to
keep awake. The position had its drawbacks, as we were so very
conspicuous in our new uniforms. A detail which sticks in my memory is
that the guests at that Drawing-Room drank over three hundred bottles
of my father's sherry, in addition to other wines.

My brother and I were not allowed in the throne-room on ordinary days,
but it offered such wonderful opportunities for processions and
investitures, with the sword of state and the mace lying ready to one's
hand in their red velvet cradles, that we soon discovered a back way
into it. Should any of the staff of Lord French, the present Viceroy,
care to examine the sword of state and the mace, they will find them
both heavily dented. This is due to two small boys having frequently
dropped them when they proved too heavy for their strength, during
strictly private processions fifty-five years ago. I often wonder what
a deputation from the Corporation of Belfast must have thought when
they were ushered into the throne-room, and found it already in the
occupation of two small brats, one of whom, with a star cut out of
silver paper pinned to his packet to counterfeit an order, was lolling
back on the throne in a lordly manner, while the other was feigning to
read a long statement from a piece of paper. The small boys, after the
manner of their kind, quickly vanished through a bolt-hole.

The Chapel Royal in Dublin Castle was built by my grandfather, the Duke
of Bedford, who was Viceroy in 1806, and it bears the stamp of the
unfortunate period of its birth on every detail of its
"carpenter-Gothic" interior. It is, however, very ornate, with a
profusion of gilding, stained glass and elaborate oak carving. My
father and mother sat by themselves on two red velvet arm-chairs in a
sort of pew-throne that projected into the Chapel. The Aide-de-Camp in
waiting, an extremely youthful warrior as a rule, had to stand until
the door of the pew was shut, when a folding wooden flap was lowered
across the aperture, on which he seated himself, with his back resting
against the pew door. At the conclusion of the service the Verger
always opened the pew door with a sudden "click." Should the
Aide-de-Camp be unprepared for this and happen to be leaning against
the door, with any reasonable luck he was almost certain to tumble
backwards into the aisle, "taking a regular toss," as hunting-men would
say, and to our unspeakable delight we would see a pair of slim legs in
overalls and a pair of spurred heels describing a graceful parabola as
they followed their youthful owner into the aisle. This particular form
of religious relaxation appealed to me enormously, and I looked forward
to it every Sunday.

It was an episode that could only occur once with each person, for
forewarned was forearmed; still, as we had twelve Aides-de-Camp, and
they were constantly changing, the pew door played its practical joke
quite often enough to render the Services in the Chapel Royal very
attractive and engrossing, and I noticed that no Aide-de-Camp was ever
warned of his possible peril. I think, too, that the Verger enjoyed his
little joke.

In that same Chapel Royal I listened to the most eloquent and beautiful
sermon I have ever heard in my life, preached by Dean Magee (afterwards
Archbishop of York) on Christmas Day, 1866. His text was: "There were
shepherds abiding in the fields." That marvellous orator must have had
some peculiar gift of sympathy to captivate the attention of a child of
ten so completely that he remembers portions of that sermon to this
very day, fifty-four years afterwards.

To my great delight I discovered a little door near our joint bedroom
which led directly into the gallery of St. Patrick's Hall. Here the big
dinners of from seventy to ninety people were held, and it was my
delight to creep into the gallery in my dressing-gown and slippers and
watch the brilliant scene below. The stately white-and-gold hall with
its fine painted ceiling, the long tables blazing with plate and
lights, the display of flowers, the jewels of the ladies and the
uniforms of the men, made a picture very attractive to a child. After
the ladies had left, the uproar became deafening. In 1866 the old
drinking habits had not yet died out, and though my father very seldom
touched wine himself, he of course saw that his guests had sufficient;
indeed, sufficient seems rather an elastic term, judging by what I saw
and what I was told. It must have been rather like one of the scenes
described by Charles Lever in his books. In 1866 political, religious,
and racial animosities had not yet assumed the intensely bitter
character they have since reached in Ireland, and the traditional Irish
wit, at present apparently dormant, still flashed, sparkled and
scintillated. From my hiding-place in the gallery I could only hear the
roars of laughter the good stories provoked, I could not hear the
stories themselves, possibly to my own advantage.

Judge Keogh had a great reputation as a wit. The then Chief Justice was
a remarkable-looking man on account of his great snow-white whiskers
and his jet-black head of hair. My mother, commenting on this, said to
Judge Keogh, "Surely Chief Justice Monaghan must dye his hair." "To my
certain knowledge he does not," answered Keogh. "How, then, do you
account for the difference in colour between his whiskers and his
hair?" asked my mother. "To the fact that, throughout his life, he has
used his jaw a great deal more than he ever has his brain," retorted
Keogh.

Father Healy, most genial and delightful of men, belongs, of course, to
a much later period. I was at the Castle in Lord Zetland's time, when
Father Healy had just returned from a fortnight's visit to Monte Carlo,
where he had been the guest (of all people in the world!) of Lord
Randolph Churchill. "May I ask how you explained your absence to your
flock, Father Healy?" asked Lady Zetland. "I merely told them that I
had been for a fortnight's retreat to Carlow; I thought it superfluous
prefixing the Monte," answered the priest. Again at a wedding, the late
Lord Morris, the possessor of the hugest brogue ever heard, observed as
the young couple drove off, "I wish that I had an old shoe to throw
after them for luck." "Throw your brogue after them, my dear fellow; it
will do just as well," flashed out Father Healy. It was Father Healy,
too, who, in posting a newly arrived lady as to Dublin notabilities,
said, "You will find that there are only two people who count in
Dublin, the Lady-Lieutenant and Lady Iveagh, her Ex. and her double X,"
for the marks on the barrels of the delicious beverage brewed by the
Guinness family must be familiar to most people.

I myself heard Father Healy, in criticising a political appointment
which lay between a Welsh and a Scotch M.P., say, "Well, if we get the
Welshman he'll pray on his knees all Sunday, and then prey on his
neighbours the other six days of the week; whilst if we get the
Scotchman hell keep the Sabbath and any other little trifles he can lay
his hand on." Healy, who was parish priest of Little Bray, used to
entertain sick priests from the interior of Ireland who were ordered
sea-bathing. One day he saw one of his guests, a young priest, rush
into the sea, glass in hand, and begin drinking the sea water. "You
mustn't do that, my dear fellow," cried Father Healy, aghast. "I didn't
know that there was any harm in it, Father Healy," said the young
priest. "Whist! we'll not say one word about it, and maybe then they'll
never miss the little drop you have taken."

Some of these stories may be old, in which case I can only apologise
for giving them here.

Dublin people have always had the gift of coining extremely felicitous
nicknames. I refrain from quoting those bestowed on two recent
Viceroys, for they are mordant and uncomplimentary, though possibly not
wholly undeserved. My father was at once christened "Old Splendid," an
appellation less scarifying than some of those conferred on his
successors. My father had some old friends living in the west of
Ireland, a Colonel Tenison, and his wife, Lady Louisa Tenison. Colonel
Tenison had one of the most gigantic noses I have ever seen, a vast,
hooked eagle's beak. He was so blind that he had to feel his way about.
Lady Louisa Tenison allowed herself an unusual freedom of speech, and
her comments on persons and things were unconventionally outspoken.
They came to stay with us at the Castle in 1867, and before they had
been there twenty-four hours they were christened "Blind Hookey" and
"Unlimited Loo."

In February 1867 my sister, brother and I contracted measles, and were
sent out to the "Lodge" to avoid spreading infection.

We were already convalescent, when one evening a mysterious stranger
arrived from the Castle, and had an interview with the governess. As a
result of that interview, the kindly old lady began clucking like a
scared hen, fussed quite prodigiously, and told us to collect our
things at once, as we were to start for the Castle in a quarter of an
hour. After a frantically hurried packing, we were bustled into the
carriage, the mysterious stranger taking his seat on the box. To our
surprise we saw some thirty mounted Hussars at the door. As we moved
off, to our unspeakable delight, the Hussars drew their swords and
closed in on the carriage, one riding at either window. And so we drove
through Dublin. We had never had an escort before, and felt immensely
elated and dignified. At the Castle there seemed to be some confusion.
I heard doors banging and people moving about all through the night.

Long afterwards I learnt that the great Fenian rising was fixed for
that night. The authorities had heard that part of the Fenian plan was
to capture the Viceregal Lodge, and to hold the Lord-Lieutenant's
children as hostages, which explains the arrival at the Lodge of Chief
Inspector Dunn, the frantic haste, and the escort of Hussars with drawn
swords.

That night an engagement, or it might more justly be termed a skirmish,
did take place between the Fenians and the troops at Tallagh, some
twenty miles from Dublin. My brothers and most of my father's staff had
been present, which explained the mysterious noises during the night.
As a result of this fight, some three hundred prisoners were taken, and
Lord Strathnairn, then Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, was very hard put
to it to find sufficient men (who, of course, would have to be detached
from his force) to escort the prisoners into Dublin. Lord Strathnairn
suddenly got an inspiration. He had every single button, brace buttons
and all, cut off the prisoners' trousers. Then the men had perforce,
for decency's sake, to hold their trousers together with their hands,
and I defy any one similarly situated to run more than a yard or two.
The prisoners were all paraded in the Castle yard next day, and I
walked out amongst them. As they had been up all night in very heavy
rain, they all looked very forlorn and miserable. The Castle gates were
shut that day, for the first time in the memory of the oldest
inhabitant, and they remained shut for four days. I cannot remember the
date when the prisoners were paraded, but I am absolutely certain as to
one point: it was Shrove Tuesday, 1867, the day on which so many
marriages are celebrated amongst country-folk in Ireland. Dublin was
seething with unrest, so on that very afternoon my father and mother
drove very slowly, quite alone, without an Aide-de-Camp or escort, in a
carriage-and-four with outriders, through all the poorest quarters in
Dublin. They were well received, and there was no hostile demonstration
whatever. The idea of the slow drive through the slums was my mother's.
She wished to show that though the Castle gates were closed, she and my
father were not afraid. I saw her on her return, when she was looking
very pale and drawn, but I was too young to realise what the strain
must have been. My mother's courage was loudly praised, but I think
that my friends O'Connor and little Byrne, the postilions, also deserve
quite a good mark, for they ran the same amount of risk, and they were
no entirely free agents in the matter, as my father and mother were.

Dr. Hatchell, who attended us all, had been physician to countless
Viceroys and their families, and was a very well-known figure in
Dublin. He was a jolly little red-faced man with a terrific brogue.
There was a great epidemic of lawlessness in Dublin at that time. Many
people were waylaid and stripped of their valuables in dark suburban
streets. Dr. Hatchell was returning from a round of professional visits
in the suburbs one evening, when his carriage was stopped by two men,
who seized the horses' heads. One of the men came round to the carriage
door.

"We know you, Dr. Hatchell, so you had better hand over your watch and
money quietly." "You know me," answered the merry little doctor, with
his tremendous brogue, "so no doubt you would like me to prescribe for
you. I'll do it with all the pleasure in life. Saltpetre is a grand
drug, and I often order it for my patients. Sulphur is the finest thing
in the world for the blood, and charcoal is an elegant disinfectant. By
a great piece of luck, I have all these drugs with me in the carriage,
but"--and he suddenly covered the man with his revolver--"they are all
mixed up together, and there is the least taste in life of lead in
front of them, and by God! you'll get it through you if you don't clear
out of that." The men decamped immediately. I have heard Dr. Hatchell
tell that story at least twenty times. Dr. Hatchell, who was invited to
every single entertainment, both at the Lodge and at the Castle, was a
widower. A peculiarly stupid young Aide-de-Camp once asked him why he
had not brought Mrs. Hatchell with him. "Sorr," answered the doctor in
his most impressive tones, "Mrs. Hatchell is an angel in heaven." A
fortnight later the same foolish youth asked again why Dr. Hatchell had
come alone. "Mrs. Hatchell, sorr, is still an angel in heaven,"
answered the indignant doctor.

It was said that no mortal eye had ever seen Dr. Hatchell in the
daytime out of his professional frock-coat and high hat. I know that
when he stayed with us in Scotland some years later, he went out
salmon-fishing in a frock-coat and high hat (with a stethescope clipped
into the crown of it), an unusual garb for an angler.

In the spring of 1868, King Edward and Queen Alexandra (then, of
course, Prince and Princess of Wales) paid us a long visit at the
Castle. My father had heard a rumour that recently the Prince of Wales
had introduced the custom of smoking in the dining-room after dinner.
He was in a difficult position; nothing would induce him to tolerate
such a practice, but how was he to avoid discourtesy to his Royal
guest? My mother rose to the occasion. A little waiting-room near the
dining-room was furnished and fitted up in the most attractive manner,
and before the Prince had been an hour in the Castle, my mother showed
him the charming little room, and told H. R. H. that it had been
specially fitted up for him to enjoy his after-dinner cigar in. That
saved the situation. Young men of to-day will be surprised to learn
that in my time no one dreamed of smoking before they went to a ball,
as to smell of smoke was considered an affront to one's partners. I
myself, though a heavy smoker from an early age, never touched tobacco
in any form before going to a dance, out of respect for my partners.
Incredible as it may sound, in those days all gentlemen had a very high
respect for ladies and young ladies, and observed a certain amount of
deference in their intercourse with them. Never, to the best of my
recollection, did either we or our partners address each other as "old
thing," or "old bean." This, of course, now is hopelessly Victorian,
and as defunct as the dodo. Present-day hostesses tell me that all
young men, and most girls, are kind enough to flick cigarette-ash all
over their drawing-rooms, and considerately throw lighted
cigarette-ends on to fine old Persian carpets, and burn holes in pieces
of valuable old French furniture. Of course it would be too much
trouble to fetch an ash-tray, or to rise to throw lighted
cigarette-ends into the grate. The young generation have never been
brought up to take trouble, nor to consider other people; we might
perhaps put it that they never think of any one in the world but their
own sweet selves. I am inclined to think that there are distinct
advantages in being a confirmed, unrepentant Victorian.

During the stay of the Prince and Princess there was one unending round
of festivities. The Princess was then at the height of her great
beauty, and seeing H. R. H. every day, my youthful adoration of her
increased tenfold. The culminating incident of the visit was to be the
installation of the Prince of Wales as a Knight of St. Patrick in St.
Patrick's Cathedral, with immense pomp and ceremonial. The Cathedral
had undergone a complete transformation for the ceremony, and all its
ordinary fittings had disappeared. The number of pages had now
increased to five, and we were constantly being drilled in the
Cathedral. We had all five of us to walk backwards down some steps,
keeping in line and keeping step. For five small boys to do this
neatly, without awkwardness, requires a great deal of practice. The
procession to the Cathedral was made in full state, the streets being
lined with troops, and the carriages, with their escorts of cavalry,
going at a foot's pace through the principal thoroughfares of Dublin. I
remember it chiefly on account of the bitter northeast wind blowing.
The five pages drove together in an open carriage, and received quite
an ovation from the crowd, but no one had thought of providing them
with overcoats. Silk stockings, satin knee-breeches and lace ruffles
are very inadequate protection against an Arctic blast, and we arrived
at the Cathedral stiff and torpid with cold. From the colour of our
faces, we might have been five little "Blue Noses" from Nova Scotia.
The ceremony was very gorgeous and imposing, and I trust that the pages
were not unduly clumsy. Every one was amazed at the beauty of the
music, sung from the triforium by the combined choirs of St. Patrick's
and Christ Church Cathedrals, and of the Chapel Royal, with that
wonderful musician, Sir Robert Stewart, at the organ. I remember well
Sir Robert Stewart's novel setting of "God save the Queen." The men
sang it first in unison to the music of the massed military bands
outside the Cathedral, the boys singing a "Faux Bourdon" above it. Then
the organ took it up, the full choir joining in with quite original
harmonies.

In honour of the Prince's visit, nearly all the Fenian prisoners who
were still detained in jail were released.

Many years after, in 1885, King Edward and Queen Alexandra paid us a
visit at Barons' Court. During that visit a little episode occurred
which is worth recording. On the Sunday, the Princess of Wales, as she
still was, inspected the Sunday School children before Morning Service.
At luncheon the Rector of the parish told us that one of the Sunday
scholars, a little girl, had been taken ill with congestion of the
lungs a few days earlier. The child's disappointment at having missed
seeing the Princess was terrible. Desperately ill as she was, she kept
on harping on her lost opportunity. After luncheon the Princess drew my
sister-in-law, the present Dowager Duchess of Abercorn, on one side,
and inquired where the sick child lived. Upon being told that it was
about four miles off, the Princess asked whether it would not be
possible to get a pony-cart from the stables and drive there, as she
would like to see the little girl. I myself brought a pony-cart around
to the door, and the Princess and my sister-in-law having got in, we
three started off alone, the Princess driving. When we reached the
cottage where the child lived, H. R. H. went straight up to the little
girl's room, and stayed talking to her for an hour, to the child's
immense joy. Two days later the little girl died, but she had been made
very happy meanwhile.

A little thing perhaps; but there are not many people in Queen
Alexandra's position who would have taken an eight-mile drive in an
open cart on a stormy and rainy April afternoon in order to avoid
disappointing a dying child, of whose very existence she had been
unaware that morning.

It is the kind heart which inspires acts like these which has drawn the
British people so irresistibly to Queen Alexandra.




CHAPTER IV


Chittenden's--A wonderful teacher--My personal experiences as a
schoolmaster--My "boys in blue"--My unfortunate garments--A "brave
Belge"--The model boy, and his name--A Spartan regime--"The Three
Sundays"--Novel religious observances--Harrow--"John Smith of
Harrow"--"Tommy" Steele--"Tosher"--An ingenious punishment--John
Farmer--His methods--The birth of a famous song--Harrow school
songs--"Ducker"--The "Curse of Versatility"--Advancing old age--The
race between three brothers--A family failing--My father's race at
sixty-four--My own--A most acrimonious dispute at Rome--Harrow after
fifty years.


I was sent to school as soon as I was nine, to Mr. Chittenden's, at
Hoddesdon, in Hertfordshire. This remarkable man had a very rare gift:
he was a born teacher, or, perhaps, more accurately, a born
mind-trainer. Of the very small stock of knowledge which I have been
able to accumulate during my life, I certainly owe at least one-half to
Mr. Chittenden. There is a certain profusely advertised system for
acquiring concentration, and for cultivating an artificial memory, the
name of which will be familiar to every one. Instead of the title it
actually bears, that system should be known as "Chittendism," for it is
precisely the method adopted by him with his pupils fifty-four years
ago. Mr. Chittenden, probably recognising that peculiar quality of
mental laziness which is such a marked characteristic of the average
English man or woman, set himself to combat and conquer it the moment
he got a pupil into his hands. Think of the extraordinary number of
persons you know who never do more than half-listen, half-understand,
half-attend, and who only read with their eyes, not with their brains.
The other half of their brain is off wool-gathering somewhere, so
naturally they forget everything they read, and the little they do
remember with half their brain is usually incorrect. It seems to me
that this sort of mental limitation is far more marked in the young
generation, probably because foolish parents seem to think it rather an
amusing trait in their offspring. Now, the boy at Chittenden's who
allowed his mind to wander, and did not concentrate, promptly made the
acquaintance of the "spatter," a broad leathern strap; and the spatter
hurt exceedingly, as I can testify from many personal experiences of
it. On the whole, then, even the most careless boy found it to his
advantage to concentrate. This clever teacher knew how quickly young
brains tire, so he never devoted more than a quarter of an hour to each
subject, but during that quarter of an hour he demanded, and got, the
full attention of his pupils. The result was that everything absorbed
remained permanently. If I enlarge at some length on Mr. Chittenden's
methods, it is because the subject of education is of such vital
importance, and the mere fact that the much-advertised system to which
I have alluded has attained such success, would seem to indicate that
many people are aware that they share that curious disability in the
intellectual equipment of the average Englishman to which I have
referred; for unless they had habitually only half-listened, half-read,
half-understood, there could be no need for their undergoing a course
of instruction late in life. Surely it is more sensible to check this
peculiarly English tendency to mental laziness quite early in life, as
Mr. Chittenden did with his boys. To my mind another striking
characteristic of the average English man and woman is their want of
observation. They don't notice: it is far too much trouble; besides,
they are probably thinking of something else. All Chittenden's boys
were taught to observe; otherwise they got into trouble. He insisted,
too, on his pupils expressing themselves in correct English, with the
result that Chittenden's boys were more intellectually advanced at
twelve than the average Public School boy is at sixteen or seventeen.
It is unusual to place such books as Paley's Christian Evidences, or
Archbishop Whately's Historic Doubts as to Napoleon Bonaparte, in the
hands of little boys of twelve, with any expectation of a satisfactory
result; yet we read them on Sundays, understood the point of them, and
could explain the why and wherefore of them. Chittenden's one fault was
his tendency to "force" a receptive boy, and to develop his intellect
too quickly. As in the Pelm--(I had very nearly written it) system, he
made great use of memoria technica, and always taught us to link one
idea with another. At the age of ten I got puzzled over Marlborough's
campaigns. "'Brom,' my boy, remember 'Brom,'" said Mr. Chittenden.
"That will give you Marlborough's victories in their proper
sequence--Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet, 'Brom'"; and
"Brom" I have remembered from that day to this.

Though it is now many years since Mr. Chittenden passed away, I must
pay this belated tribute to the memory of a very skilful teacher, and
an exceedingly kind friend, to whom I owe an immense debt of gratitude.

My own experiences as a pedagogue are limited. During the War, I was
asked to give some lessons in elementary history and rudimentary French
to convalescent soldiers in a big hospital. No one ever had a more
cheery and good-tempered lot of pupils than I had in my blue-clad,
red-tied disciples. For remembering the order of the Kings of England,
we used Mr. Chittenden's jingle, beginning:

    "Billy, Billy, Harry, Ste,
    Harry, Dick, Jack, Harry Three."

By repeating it all together, over and over again, the very jangle of
it made it stick in my pupils' memory. Dates proved a great difficulty,
yet a few dates, such as that of the Norman Conquest and of the Battle
of Waterloo, were essential. "Clarke, can you remember the date of the
Norman Conquest?" "Very sorry, sir; clean gone out of my 'ead." "Now,
Daniels, how about the date of Waterloo?" "You've got me this time,
sir." Then I had an inspiration. Feigning to take up a
telephone-receiver, and to speak down it, I begged for "Willconk, One,
O, double-six, please." Twenty blithesome wounded Tommies at once went
through an elaborate pantomime of unhooking receivers, and asked
anxiously for "Willconk--One, O, double-six, miss, please. No, miss, I
didn't say, 'City, six, eight, five, four'; I said 'Willconk, One, O,
double-six.' Thank you, miss; now I can let mother know I'm coming to
tea." This, accompanied by much playful badinage with the imaginary
operator, proved immensely popular, but "Willconk, One, O, double-six"
stuck in the brains of my blue-clothed flock. In the same way the
Battle of Waterloo became "Batterloo--One, eight, one, five, please,
miss," so both those dates remained in their heads.

We experienced some little trouble in mastering the French numerals,
until I tried a new scheme, and called out, "From the right, number, in
French!" Then my merry convalescents began shouting gleefully, "Oon,"
"Doo," "Troy," "Catta," "Sink," etc.; but the French numerals stuck in
their heads. Never did any one, I imagine, have such a set of jolly,
cheery boys in blue as pupils, and the strong remnant of the child left
in many of them made them the more attractive.

When I first went to school, the selection and purchase of my outfit
was, for some inscrutable reason, left to my sisters' governess, an
elderly lady to whom I was quite devoted. This excellent person,
though, knew very little about boys, and nothing whatever as to their
requirements. Her mind harked back to the "thirties" and "forties," and
she endeavoured to reconstitute the dress of little boys at that
period. She ordered for me a velvet tunic for Sunday wear, of the sort
seen in old prints, and a velvet cap with a peak and tassel, such as
young England wore in William IV.'s days. She had large, floppy, limp
collars specially made for me, of the pattern worn by boys in her
youth; every single article of my unfortunate equipment had been
obsolete for at least thirty years. In my ignorance, and luckily not
knowing what was in store for me, I felt immensely proud of my new kit.

On the first Sunday after my arrival at school, I arrayed myself with
great satisfaction in a big, floppy collar, and my new velvet tunic,
amidst the loud jeers of all the other boys in the dormitory. I was,
however, hardly prepared for the yells and howls of derision with which
my appearance in the school-room was greeted; my unfortunate garments
were held to be so unspeakably grotesque that boys laughed till the
tears ran down their cheeks. As church-time approached the boys
produced their high hats, which I found were worn even by little
fellows of eight; I had nothing but my terrible tasselled velvet cap,
the sight of which provoked even louder jeers than the tunic had done.
We marched to church two and two, in old-fashioned style in a
"crocodile," but not a boy in the school would walk beside me in my
absurd garments, so a very forlorn little fellow trotted to church
alone behind the usher, acutely conscious of the very grotesque figure
he was presenting. I must have been dressed very much as Henry
Fairchild was when he went to visit his little friend Master Noble. On
returning from church, I threw my velvet cap into the water-butt,
where, for all I know, it probably is still, and nothing would induce
me to put on the velvet tunic or the floppy collars a second time. I
bombarded my family with letters until I found myself equipped with a
high hat and Eton jackets and collars such as the other boys wore.

We were taught French at Chittenden's by a very pleasant old Belgian,
M. Vansittart. I could talk French then as easily as English, and after
exchanging a few sentences with M. Vansittart, he cried, "Tiens! mais
c'est un petit Francais;" but the other boys laughed so unmercifully at
what they termed my affected accent, that in self-defence I adopted an
ultra-British pronunciation, made intentional mistakes, and, in order
to conform to type, punctiliously addressed our venerable instructor as
"Moosoo," just as the other boys did. M. Vansittart must have been a
very old man, for he had fought as a private in the Belgian army at the
Battle of Waterloo. He had once been imprudent enough to admit that he
and some Belgian friends of his had...how shall we put it?...absented
themselves from the battlefield without the permission of their
superiors, and had hurriedly returned to Brussels, being doubtless
fatigued by their exertions. His little tormentors never let him forget
this. When we thought that we had done enough French for the day, a
shrill young voice would pipe out, "Now, Moosoo, please tell us how you
and all the Belgians ran away from the Battle of Waterloo." It never
failed to achieve the desired end. "Ah! tas de petits sacripants! 'Ow
dare you say dat?" thundered the poor old gentleman, and he would go on
to explain that his and his friends' retirement was only actuated by
the desire to be the first bearers to Brussels of the news of
Wellington's great victory, and to assuage their families' very natural
anxiety as to their safety. He added, truthfully enough, "Nos jambes
courraient malgres nous." Poor M. Vansittart! He was a gentle and a
kindly old man, with traces of the eighteenth-century courtliness of
manner, and smothered in snuff.

Mr. Chittenden was never tired of dinning into us the astonishing
merits of a pupil who had been at the school eleven or twelve years
before us. This model boy apparently had the most extraordinary mental
gifts, and had never broken any of the rules. Mr. Chittenden predicted
a brilliant future for him, and would not be surprised should he
eventually become Prime Minister. The paragon had had a distinguished
career at Eton, and was at present at Cambridge, where he was certain
to do equally well. From having this Admirable Crichton perpetually
held up to us as an example, we grew rather tired of his name, much as
the Athenians wearied at constantly hearing Aristides described as "the
just." At length we heard that the pattern-boy would spend two days at
Hoddesdon on his way back to Cambridge. We were all very anxious to see
him. As Mr. Chittenden confidently predicted that he would one day
become Prime Minister, I formed a mental picture of him as being like
my uncle, Lord John Russell, the only Prime Minister I knew. He would
be very short, and would have his neck swathed in a high black-satin
stock. When the Cambridge undergraduate appeared, he was, on the
contrary, very tall and thin, with a slight stoop, and so far from
wearing a high stock, he had an exceedingly long neck emerging from a
very low collar. His name was Arthur James Balfour.

I think Mr. Balfour and the late Mr. George Wyndham were the only
pupils of Chittenden's who made names for themselves. The rest of us
were content to plod along in the rut, though we had been taught to
concentrate, to remember, and to observe.

Compared with the manner in which little boys are now pampered at
preparatory schools, our method of life appears very Spartan. We never
had fires or any heating whatever in our dormitories, and the windows
were always open. We were never given warm water to wash in, and in
frosty weather our jugs were frequently frozen over. Truth compels me
to admit that this freak of Nature's was rather welcomed, for little
boys are not as a rule over-enamoured of soap and water, and it was an
excellent excuse for avoiding any ablutions whatever. We rose at six,
winter and summer, and were in school by half-past six. The windows of
the school-room were kept open, whilst the only heating came from a
microscopic stove jealously guarded by a huge iron stockade to prevent
the boys from approaching it. For breakfast we were never given
anything but porridge and bread and butter. We had an excellent dinner
at one o'clock, but nothing for tea but bread and butter again, never
cake or jam. It will horrify modern mothers to learn that all the boys,
even little fellows of eight, were given two glasses of beer at dinner.
And yet none of us were ever ill. I was nearly five years at
Chittenden's, and I do not remember one single case of illness. We were
all of us in perfect health, nor were we ever afflicted with those
epidemics which seem to play such havoc with modern schools, from all
of which I can only conclude that a regime of beer and cold rooms is
exceedingly good for little boys.

The Grange, Mr. Chittenden's house, was one of the most perfect
examples of a real Queen Anne house that I ever saw. Every room in the
house was wood-panelled, and there was some fine carving on the
staircase. The house, with a splendid avenue of limes leading up to it,
stood in a large old-world garden, where vast cedar trees spread
themselves duskily over shaven lawns round a splashing fountain, and
where scarlet geraniums blazed. Such a beautiful old place was quite
wasted as a school.

We were very well treated by both Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden, and we were
all very happy at the Grange. During my first year there one of my
elder brothers died. A child of ten, should death never have touched
his family, looks upon it as something infinitely remote, affecting
other people but not himself. Then when the first gap in the home
occurs, all the child's little world tumbles to pieces, and he wonders
how the birds have the heart to go on singing as usual, and how the sun
can keep on shining. A child's grief is very poignant and real. I can
never forget Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden's extreme kindness to a very
sorrowful little boy at that time.

There was one curious custom at Chittenden's, and I do not know whether
it obtained in other schools in those days. Some time in the summer
term the head-boy would announce that "The Three Sundays" had arrived,
and must be duly observed according to ancient custom. We all obeyed
him implicity. The first Sunday was "Cock-hat Sunday," the second "Rag
Sunday," and the third (if I may be pardoned) "Spit-in-the-pew Sunday."
On the first Sunday we all marched to church with our high hats at an
extreme angle over our left ears; on the second Sunday every boy had
his handkerchief trailing out of his pocket; on the third, I am sorry
to say, thirty-one little boys expectorated surreptitiously but
simultaneously in the pews, as the first words of the Litany were
repeated. I think that we were all convinced that these were regularly
appointed festivals of the Church of England. I know that I was, and I
spent hours hunting fruitlessly through my Prayer Book to find some
allusion to them. I found Sundays after Epiphany, Sundays in Lent, and
Sundays after Trinity, but not one word could I discover, to my
amazement, either about "Cock-hat Sunday" or "Spit-in-the-pew Sunday."
What can have been the origin of this singular custom I cannot say.
When I, in my turn, became head-boy, I fixed "The Three Sundays" early
in May. It so happened that year that the Thursday after "Cock-hat
Sunday" was Ascension Day, when we also went to church, but, it being a
week-day, we wore our school caps in the place of high hats. Ascension
Day thus falling, if I may so express myself, within the Octave of
"Cock-hat Sunday," I decreed that the customary ritual must be observed
with the school caps, and my little flock obeyed me implicitly. So
eager were some of the boys to do honour to this religious festival,
that their caps were worn at such an impossible angle that they kept
tumbling off all the way to church. It is the only time in my life that
I have ever wielded even a semblance of ecclesiastical authority, and I
cannot help thinking that the Archbishop of Canterbury would have
envied the unquestioning obedience with which all my directions were
received, for I gather that his own experience has not invariably been
equally fortunate.

At thirteen I said good-bye to the pleasant Grange, and went, as my
elder brothers, my father, and my grandfather had done before me, to
Harrow.

In the Harrow of the "seventies" there was one unique personality, that
of the Rev. John Smith, best-loved of men. This saintly man was
certainly very eccentric. We never knew then that his whole life had
been one long fight against the hereditary insanity which finally
conquered him. In appearance he was very tall and gaunt, with
snow-white whiskers and hair, and the kindest eyes I have ever seen in
a human face; he was meticulously clean and neat in his dress. "John,"
as he was invariably called, on one occasion met a poorly clad beggar
shivering in the street on a cold day, and at once stripped off his own
overcoat and insisted on the beggar taking it. John never bought
another overcoat, but wrapped himself in a plaid in winter-time. He
addressed all boys indiscriminately as "laddie," though he usually
alluded to the younger ones as "smallest of created things,"
"infinitesimal scrap of humanity," or "most diminutive of men"; but,
wildly eccentric as he was, no one ever thought of laughing at him. It
was just "old John," and that explained everything.

I was never "up" to John, for he taught a low Form, and I had come from
Chittenden's, and all Chittenden's boys took high places; but he took
"pupil-room" in my house, and helped my tutor generally, so I saw John
daily, and, like every one else, I grew very much attached to this
simple, saint-like old clergyman.

He went round every room in the house on Sunday evenings, always first
scrupulously knocking at the door. An untidy room gave him positive
pain, and the most slovenly boys would endeavour to get their filthy
rooms into some sort of order, "just to please old John." John was
passionately fond of flowers, and one would meet the most unlikely boys
with bunches of roses in their hands. If one inquired what they were
for, they would say half-sheepishly, "Oh, just a few roses I've bought.
I thought they would please old John; you know how keen the old chap is
on flowers." Now English schoolboys are not as a rule in the habit of
presenting flowers to their masters. For all his apparent simplicity,
John was not easy to "score off." I have known Fifth-form boys bring a
particularly difficult passage of Herodotus to John in "pupil-room,"
knowing that he was not a great Greek scholar. John, after glancing at
the passage, would say, "Laddie, you splendid fellows in the Upper
Fifth know so much; I am but a humble and very ignorant old man. This
passage is beyond my attainments. Go to your tutor, my child. He will
doubtless make it all clear to you; and pray accept my apologies for
being unable to help you," and the Fifth-form boy would go away feeling
thoroughly ashamed of himself. After his death, it was discovered from
his diary that John had been in the habit of praying for twenty boys by
name, every night of his life. He went right down the school list, and
then he began again. Any lack of personal cleanliness drove him
frantic. I myself have heard him order a boy with dirty nails and hands
out of the room, crying, "Out of my sight, unclean wretch! Go and
cleanse the hands God gave you, before I allow you to associate with
clean gentlemen, and write out for me two hundred times, 'Cleanliness
is next to godliness.'"

John took the First Fourth, and his little boys could always be
detected by their neatness and extreme cleanliness. Neither of these
can be called a characteristic of little boys in general, but the
little fellows made an effort to overcome their natural tendencies "to
please old John." When his hereditary enemy triumphed, and his reason
left him, hundreds of his old pupils wished to subscribe, and to
surround John for the remainder of his life with all the comforts that
could be given him in his afflicted condition. It was very
characteristic of John to refuse this offer, and to go of his own
accord into a pauper asylum, where he combined the duties of chaplain
and butler until his death. John was buried at Harrow, and by his own
wish no bell was tolled, and his coffin was covered with scarlet
geraniums, as a sign of rejoicing. I know how I should describe John,
were I preaching a sermon.

Another mildly eccentric Harrow master was the Rev. T. Steele,
invariably known as "Tommy." His peculiarities were limited to his use
of the pronoun "we" instead of "I," as though he had been a crowned
head, and to his habit of perpetually carrying, winter and summer, rain
or sunshine, a gigantic bright blue umbrella. He had these umbrellas
specially made for him; they were enormous, the sort of umbrellas Mrs.
Gamp must have brought with her when her professional services were
requisitioned, and they were of the most blatant blue I have ever
beheld. Old Mr. Steele, with his jovial rubicund face, his flowing
white beard, and his bright blue umbrella, was a species of walking
tricolour flag.

Schoolboys worship a successful athlete. There was a very pleasant
mathematical master named Tosswill, always known as "Tosher," who at
that time held the record for a broad jump, he having cleared, when
jumping for Oxford, twenty-two and a half feet. That record has long
since been beaten. Should one be walking with another boy when passing
"Tosher," he was almost certain to say, "You know that Tosher holds the
record for broad jumps. Twenty-two and a half feet; he must be an
awfully decent chap!" Tosswill had the knack of devising ingenious
punishments. I was "up" to him for mathematics, and, with my hopelessly
non-mathematical mind, I must have been a great trial to him. At that
time I was playing the euphonium in the school brass band, an
instrument which afforded great joy to its exponents, for in most
military marches the solo in the "trio" falls to the euphonium, though
I fancy that I evoked the most horrible sounds from my big brass
instrument. To play a brass instrument with any degree of precision, it
is first necessary to acquire a "lip"--that is to say, the centre of
the lip covered by the mouthpiece must harden and thicken before "open
notes" can be sounded accurately. To "get a lip" quickly, I always
carried my mouthpiece in my pocket, and blew noiselessly into it
perpetually, even in school. Tosher had noticed this. One day my
algebra paper was even worse than usual. With the best intentions in
the world to master this intricate branch of knowledge, algebra
conveyed nothing whatever to my brain. To state that A + b = xy, seemed
to me the assertion of a palpable and self-evident falsehood. After
looking through my paper, Tosher called me up. "Your algebra is quite
hopeless, Hamilton. You will write me out a Georgic. No; on second
thoughts, as you seem to like your brass instrument, you shall bring it
up to my house every morning for ten days, and as the clock strikes
seven, you shall play me "Home, Sweet Home" under my window."
Accordingly every morning for ten days I trudged through the High
Street of Harrow with my big brass instrument under my arm, and as
seven rang out from the school clock, I commenced my extremely
lugubrious rendering of "Home, Sweet Home," on the euphonium, to a
scoffing and entirely unsympathetic audience of errand-boys and early
loafers, until Tosher's soap-lathered face nodded dismissal from the
window.

The school songs play a great part in Harrow life. Generation after
generation of boys have sung these songs, and they form a most potent
bond of union between Harrovians of all ages, for their words and music
are as familiar to the old Harrovian of sixty as to the present
Harrovian of sixteen.

Most of these songs are due to the genius of two men, Edward Bowen and
John Farmer. Like Gilbert and Sullivan, neither of these would, I
think, have risen to his full height without the aid of the other.
Farmer had an inexhaustible flow of facile melody at his command,
always tuneful, sometimes almost inspired. In addition to the published
songs, he was continually throwing off musical settings to topical
verse, written for some special occasion. These were invariably bright
and catchy, and I am sorry that Farmer considered them of too ephemeral
a nature to be worth preserving. "Racquets," in particular, had a
delightfully ear-tickling refrain. Bowen's words are a little unequal
at times, but at his best he is very hard to beat.

I had organ lessons from Farmer, and as I liked him extremely, I was
continually at his house. I enjoyed seeing him covering sheets of music
paper with rapid notation, and then humming the newly born product of
his musical imagination. As I had a fairly good treble voice, and could
read a part easily, Farmer often selected me to try one of his new
compositions at "house-singing," where the boys formed an exceedingly
critical audience. Either the new song was approved of, or it was
received in chilling silence. Farmer in moments of excitement perspired
more than any human being I have ever seen. Going to his house one
afternoon, I found him bathed in perspiration, writing away for dear
life. He motioned me to remain silent, and went on writing. Presently
he jumped up, and exclaimed triumphantly, "I have got it! I have got it
at last!" He then showed me the words he was setting to music. They
began:

    "Forty years on, when afar and asunder,
    Parted are those who are singing to-day."

"I wrote another tune to it first," explained Farmer, "a bright tune, a
regular bell-tinkle" (his invariable expression for a catchy tune),
"but Bowen's words are too fine for that. They want something
hymn-like, something grand, and now I've found it. Listen!" and Farmer
played me that majestic, stately melody which has since been heard in
every country and in every corner of the globe, wherever two old
Harrovians have come together. Some people may recall how, during the
Boer War, "Forty years on" was sung by two mortally wounded Harrovians
on the top of Spion Kop just before they died.

To my great regret my voice had broken then, else it is quite possible
that Farmer might have selected me to sing "Forty years on" for the
very first time. As it was, that honour fell to a boy named A.M.
Wilkinson, who had a remarkably sweet voice.

John Farmer's eccentricities were, I think, all assumed. He thought
they helped him to manage the boys. I sang in the chapel choir, and he
circulated the quaintest little notes amongst us, telling us how he
wished the Psalms sung. "Psalm 136, quite gaily and cheerfully; Psalm
137, very slowly and sorrowfully; Psalm 138, real merry bell-tinkle,
with plenty of organ.--J. F."

Long after I had left, Farmer continued to pour out a ceaseless flow of
school songs. Of course they varied in merit, but in some, such as
"Raleigh," and "Five Hundred Faces," he managed to touch some subtle
chord of sympathy that makes them very dear to those who heard them in
their youth. After Farmer left Harrow for Oxford, his successor, Eaton
Faning, worthily continued the traditions. All Eaton Failing's songs
are melodious, but in two of them, "Here, sir!" and "Pray, charge your
glasses, gentlemen," he reaches far higher levels.

The late E.W. Howson's words to "Here, sir!" seem to strike exactly the
right note for boys. They are fine and virile, with underlying
sentiment, yet free from the faintest suspicion of mawkish
sentimentality. Two of the verses are worth quoting:

    "Is it nought--our long procession,
    Father, brother, friend, and son,
    As we step in quick succession,
    Cap and pass and hurry on?
    One and all,
    At the call,
    Cap and pass and hurry on?
    Here, sir! Here, sir!" etc.

    "So to-day--and oh! if ever
    Duty's voice is ringing clear,
    Bidding men to brave endeavour,
    Be our answer, 'We are here!'
    Come what will,
    Good or ill,
    We will answer, 'We are here!'
    Here, sir! Here, sir!" etc.

The allusion is, of course, to "Bill," the Harrow term for the
roll-call. These lines, for me, embody all that is best in the
so-called "Public School spirit."

In my time the distant view from the chapel terrace was exceedingly
beautiful, whilst the immediate foreground was uncompromisingly ugly. A
vegetable garden then covered the space where now the steps of the
"Slopes" run down through lawns and shrubberies, and rows of
utilitarian cabbages and potatoes extended right up to the terrace
wall. But beyond this prosaic display of kitchen-stuff, in summer-time
an unbroken sea of green extended to the horizon, dotted with such
splendid oaks as only a heavy clay soil can produce. London, instead of
being ten miles off, might have been a hundred miles distant. Now, for
fifty years London, Cobbett's "monstrous wen," has been throwing her
tentative feelers into the green Harrow country. Already pioneer
tentacles of red-brick houses are creeping over the fields, and before
long the rural surroundings will have vanished beyond repair.

"Ducker," the Harrow bathing-place, has had scant justice done to it.
It is a most attractive spot, standing demurely isolated amidst its
encircling fringe of fine elms, and jealously guarded by a high wooden
palisade, No unauthorised person can penetrate into "Ducker"; in
summer-time it is the boys' own domain. The long tiled pool stretches
in sweeping curves for 250 feet under the great elms, a splashing
fountain at one end, its far extremity gay with lawns and flower-beds.
I can conceive of nothing more typical of the exuberant joie-de-vivre
of youth than the sight of Ducker on a warm summer evening when the
place is ringing with the shouts and laughter of some four hundred
boys, all naked as when they were born, swimming, diving, ducking each
other, splashing and rollicking in the water, whilst others stretched
out on the grass, puris naturalibus, are basking in the sun, or
regaling themselves on buns and cocoa. The whole place is vibrant with
the intense zest the young feel in life, and with the whole-hearted
powers of enjoyment of boyhood. A school-song set to a captivating
waltz-lilt record the charms of Ducker. One verse of it,

    "Oh! the effervescing tingle,
    How it rushes in the veins!
    Till the water seems to mingle
    With the pulses and the brains,"

exactly expresses the reason why, as a boy, I loved Ducker so.

Unfortunately, I never played cricket for Harrow at "Lords," as my two
brothers George and Ernest did. My youngest brother would, I think,
have made a great name for himself as a cricketer, had not the fairies
endowed him at his birth with a fatal facility for doing everything
easily. As the result of this versatility, his ambitions were
continually changing. He accordingly abandoned cricket for steeplechase
riding, at which he distinguished himself until politics ousted
steeplechase riding. After some years, politics gave place to golf and
music, which were in their turn supplanted by photography. He then
tried writing a few novels, and very successful some of them were,
until it finally dawned on him that his real vocation in life was that
of a historian. My brother was naturally frequently rallied by his
family on his inconstancy of purpose, but he pleaded in extenuation
that versatility had very marked charms of its own. He produced one day
a copy of verses, written in the Gilbertian metre, to illustrate his
mental attitude, and they strike me as so neatly worded, that I will
reproduce them in full.

    "THE CURSE OF VERSATILITY"

    "It is possible the student of Political Economy
    Might otherwise have cultivated Fame,
    And the Scientist whose energies are given to Astronomy
    May sacrifice a literary name.
    In the Royal Academician may be buried a facility
    For prosecuting Chemical Research,
    But he knows that if he truckles to the Curse of Versatility,
    Competitors will leave him in the lurch.

    "If an eminent physician should develop a proclivity
    For singing on the operatic stage,
    He will find that though his patients may apparently forgive
      it, he
    Will temporal'ly cease to be the rage,
    And the lawyer who depreciates his logical ability
    And covets a poetical renown,
    Will discover on his Circuit that the Curse of Versatility
    Has limited the office of his gown.

    "The costermonger yonder, if he had the opportunity,
    Might rival the political career
    Of the orator who poses as the pride of the community,
    The Radical Hereditary Peer.
    And the genius who fattens on a chronic inability
    To widen the horizon of his brain,
    May be stupider than others whom the Curse of Versatility
    Has fettered with a mediocre chain.

    "Should a Civil Servant woo the panegyrics of Society,
    And hanker after posthumous applause,
    It MAY happen that possession of a prodigal variety
    Of talents will invalidate his cause.
    He must learn to put a tether on his cerebral agility,
    And focus all his energies of aim
    On ONE isolated idol, or the Curse of Versatility
    Will drag him from the pinnacle of Fame.

    "Though the Curse may be upon us, and condemn us for Eternity
    To jostle with the ordinary horde;
    Though we grovel at the shrine of the professional fraternity
    Who harp upon one solitary chord;
    Still...we face the situation with an imperturbability
    Of spirit, from the knowledge that we owe
    To the witchery that lingers in the Curse of Versatility
    The balance of our happiness below."

Of course, to some temperaments variety will appeal; whilst others
revel in monotony. The latter are like a District Railway train, going
perpetually round and round the same Inner Circle. As far as my
experience goes, the former are the more interesting people to meet.

To persons of my time of life, the last verse of "Forty years on" has a
tendency to linger in the memory. It runs--

    "Forty years on, growing older and older,
    Shorter in wind, as in memory long,
    Feeble of foot, and rheumatic of shoulder,
    What will it help you that once you were strong?"

Although it is now fifty, instead of "forty years on," I indignantly
disclaim the "feeble of foot," whilst reluctantly pleading guilty to
"rheumatic of shoulder." It is common to most people, as they advance
in life, to note with a sorrowful satisfaction the gradual decay of the
physical powers of their contemporaries, though they always seem to
imagine that they themselves have retained all their pristine vigour,
and have successfully resisted every assault of Time's battering-ram.
The particular sentiment described in German as "Schadenfreude,"
"pleasure over another's troubles" (how characteristic it is that there
should be no equivalent in any other language for this peculiarly
Teutonic emotion!), makes but little appeal to the average Briton
except where questions of age and of failing powers come into play, and
obviously this only applies to men: no lady ever grows old for those
who are really fond of her; one always sees her as one likes best to
think of her.

I have already divulged one family secret, so I will reveal another.
Some few years ago my three eldest brothers were dining together. Each
of them professed deep concern at the palpable signs of physical decay
which he detected in his brethren, whilst congratulating himself on
remaining untouched by advancing years. The dispute became acrimonious
to a degree; the grossest personalities were freely bandied about. At
length it was decided to put the matter to a practical test, and it was
agreed (I tell this in the strictest confidence) that the three
brothers should run a hundred yards race in the street then and there.
Accordingly, a nephew of mine paced one hundred yards in Montagu
Street, Portman Square, and stood immovable as winning-post. The
Chairman of the British South African Chartered Company, the Chairman
of the Great Eastern Railway Company, and the Secretary of State for
India took up their positions in the street and started. The Chairman
of the Great Eastern romped home. We are all of us creatures of our
environment, and we may become unconsciously coloured by that
environment; as the Great Eastern Railway has always adopted a go-ahead
policy, it is possible that some particle of the momentum which would
naturally result from this may have been subconsciously absorbed by the
Chairman, thus giving him an unfair advantage over his brothers. It is
unusual for a Duke, a Chairman of an important Railway Company, and a
Secretary of State to run races in a London street at ten o'clock at
night, especially when the three of them were long past their sixtieth
year, but I feel certain that my confidence about this little episode
will be respected.

I fear that this habit of running races late in life may be a family
failing. During my father's second tenure of office as Lord-Lieutenant
of Ireland, he was still an enthusiastic cricketer, and played
regularly in the Viceregal team in spite of his sixty-four years. The
Rev. Dr. Mahaffy, Professor of Ancient History at Trinity College,
Dublin, also played for the Viceregal Lodge in his capacity of Chaplain
to the Viceroy. Dr. Mahaffy, though a fine bowler, was the worst runner
I have ever seen. He waddled and paddled slowly over the ground like a
duck, with his feet turned outwards, exactly as that uninteresting fowl
moves. My father frequently rallied Dr. Mahaffy on his defective
locomotive powers, and finally challenged him to a two hundred yards
race. My father being sixty-four years old, and Dr. Mahaffy only
thirty-six, it was agreed that the Professor should be handicapped by
wearing cricket-pads, and by carrying a cricket bat. I was present at
the race, which came off in the gardens of the Viceregal Lodge, before
quite a number of people. My father won with the utmost ease, to the
delirious joy of the two policemen on duty, who had never before seen a
Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland racing a Professor of Trinity College.

I myself must plead guilty to having entered for a "Veterans' Race" two
years ago, at the age of sixty-one, at some Sunday School sports in
Ireland. I ran against a butler, a gardener, two foremen-mechanics, and
four farmers, but only achieved second place, and that at the price of
a sprained tendon, so possibly the "feeble of foot" of the song really
is applicable to me after all. The butler, who won, started off with
the lead and kept it, though one would naturally have expected a butler
to run a "waiting" race.

I was at Harrow with the Duke of Aosta, brother of the beautiful Queen
Margherita of Italy. H. R. H. sported a full curly yellow beard at the
age of sixteen, a somewhat unusual adornment for an English schoolboy.
When I accompanied my father's special Mission to Rome in 1878, at a
luncheon at the Quirinal Palace, Queen Margherita alluded to her
brother having been at Harrow, and added, "I am told that Harrow is the
best school in England." The Harrovians present, including my father,
my brother Claud, myself, the late Lord Bradford, and my brother-in-law
the late Lord Mount Edgcumbe, welcomed this indisputable proposition
warmly--nay, enthusiastically. The Etonians who were there, Sir
Augustus Paget, then British Ambassador in Rome, the late Lord
Northampton, and others, contravened her Majesty's obviously true
statement with great heat, quite oblivious of the fact that it is
opposed to all etiquette to contradict a Crowned Head. The dispute
engendered considerable heat on either side; the walls of that hall in
the Quirinal rang with our angered protests, until the Italians present
became quite alarmed. Our discussion having taken place in English,
they had been unable to follow it, and they felt the gravest
apprehensions as to the plot the foreigners were evidently hatching.
When told that we were merely discussing the rival merits of two
schools in England, they were more than ever confirmed in their opinion
that all English people were hopelessly mad.

To one like myself, to whom it has fallen to visit almost every country
on the face of the globe, there is always a tinge of melancholy in
revisiting the familiar High Street of Harrow. It is like returning to
the starting-point at the conclusion of a long race. The externals
remain unchanged. Outwardly, the New Schools, the Chapel, the Vaughan
Library, and the Head-Master's House all wear exactly the same aspect
that they bore half a century ago. They have not changed, and the
ever-renewed stream of young life flows through the place as joyously
as it did fifty years ago. But....

    "Oh, the great days in the distance enchanted,
    Days of fresh air, in the rain and the sun."

At times the imagination is apt to play tricks and to set back the
hands of the clock, until one pictures oneself again in a short jacket
and Eton collar, going up to school, with a pile of books hugged under
the left arm, and the intervening half-century wiped out. But, as they
would put it in Ireland, these lucky, fresh-faced youngsters of to-day
have their futures in front of them, not behind them. Then it is that
Howson's words, wedded to John Farmer's haunting refrain, come back to
the mind--

    "Yet the time may come as the years go by,
    When your heart will thrill
    At the thought of 'The Hill'
    And the day that you came, so strange and shy."




CHAPTER V


Mme. Ducros--A Southern French country town--"Tartarin de
Tarascon"--His prototypes at Nyons--M. Sisteron the roysterer--The
Southern French--An octogenarian pesteur--French
industry--"Bone-shakers"--A wonderful
"Cordon-bleu"--"Slop-basin"--French legal procedure--The
bons-vivants--The merry French judges--La gaiete francaise--Delightful
excursions--Some sleepy old towns--Orange and Avignon--M. Thiers'
ingenious cousin--Possibilities--French political situation in
1874--The Comte de Chambord--Some French characteristics--High
intellectual level--Three days in a Trappist Monastery--Details of life
there--The Arian heresy--Silkworm culture--Tendencies of French to
complicate details--Some examples--Cicadas in London.


As it had already been settled that I was to enter the Diplomatic
Service, my father very wisely determined that I should leave Harrow as
soon as I was seventeen to go to France, in order to learn French
thoroughly. As he pointed out, it would take three years at least to
become proficient in French and German, and it would be as well to
begin at once.

The French tutor selected for me enjoyed a great reputation at that
time. Oddly enough, she was a woman, but it will be gathered that she
was quite an exceptional woman, when I say that she had for years ruled
four unruly British cubs, varying in age from seventeen to twenty, with
an absolute rod of iron. Mme. Ducros was the wife of a French judge,
she spoke English perfectly, and must have been in her youth a
wonderfully good-looking woman. She was very tall, and still adhered to
the dress and headdress of the "sixties," wearing little bunches of
curls over each ear--a becoming fashion, even if rather reminiscent of
a spaniel.

The Ducros lived at Nyons in the south of France. Nyons lay twenty-five
miles east of the main line from Paris to Marseilles, and could only be
reached by diligence. I think that I can safely say that no foreigner
(with the exception of the Ducros' pupils) had ever set foot in Nyons,
for the place was quite unknown, and there was nothing to draw
strangers there. It was an extraordinarily attractive spot, lying in a
little circular cup of a valley of the Dauphine Alps, through which a
brawling river had bored its way. Nyons was celebrated for its wine,
its olive oil, its silk, and its truffles, all of them superlatively
good. The ancient little walled town, basking in this sun-trap of a
valley, stood out ochre-coloured against the silver-grey background of
olive trees, whilst the jagged profiles of the encircling hills were
always mistily blue, with that intense blue of which the Provence hills
seem alone to have the secret. So few English people knew anything
about the conditions of life in a little out-of-the-way French
provincial town, where no foreigners have ever set foot, that it may be
worth while saying something about them. In the first place, it must
have been deadly dull for the inhabitants, for nothing whatever
happened there. Even the familiar "tea and tennis," the stereotyped
mild dissipation of little English towns, was quite unknown. There was
no entertaining of any sort, beyond the formal visits the ladies were
perpetually paying each other. The Ducros alone, occasionally, asking
their legal friends to dinner, invitations accepted with the utmost
enthusiasm, for the culinary genius who presided over the Ducros'
kitchen (M. Dueros' own sister) deservedly enjoyed an enormous local
reputation.

Most people must be familiar with Alphonse Daudet's immortal work,
Tartarin de Tarascon, in which the typical "Meridional" of Southern
France is portrayed with such unerring exactitude that Daudet himself,
after writing the book, was never able to set foot in Tarascon again.

We had a cercle in Nyons, in the Place Napoleon (re-christened Place de
la Republique after September 4, 1870), housed in three rather stately,
sparsely furnished, eighteenth-century rooms. Here, with the exception
of Tartarin himself, the counterparts of all Daudet's characters were
to be found. "Le Capitaine Bravida" was represented by Colonel Olivier,
a fiercely moustached and imperialled Crimean veteran, who perpetually
breathed fire and swords on any potential enemy of France. "Costecalde"
found his prototype in M. Sichap, who, although he had in all
probability never fired off a gun in his life, could never see a tame
pigeon, or even a sparrow flying over him, without instantly putting
his walking-stick to his shoulder and loudly ejaculating, "Pan, pan,"
which was intended to counterfeit the firing of both barrels of a gun.
I once asked M. Sichap why so excellent a shot as he (with a
walking-stick) invariably missed his bird with his first barrel, and
only brought him down with his second. This was quite a new light to M.
Sichap, who had hithered considered the double "Pan, pan," an
indispensable adjunct to the pantomime of firing a gun; much as my
young brother and I had once imagined "Ug, ug," an obligatory
commencement to any remark made by a Red Indian "brave."

In so remote a place as Nyons, over four hundred miles from the
capital, the glamour of Paris exercised a magical attraction. The few
inhabitants of Nyons who had ever visited Paris, or even merely passed
through it, were never quite as other people, some little remnant of an
aureole encircled them. The dowdy little wife of M. Pelissier, who had
first seen the light in some grubby suburb of Paris, either
Levallois-Perret or Clichy, held an immense position in Nyons on the
strength of being "une vraie Parisienne," and most questions of taste
were referred to her. M. Sisteron, the collector of taxes, himself a
native of Nyons, had twenty years before gone to Paris on business, and
spent four days there. There were the darkest rumours current in Nyons,
to the effect that M. Sisteron had spent these four days in a whirl of
the most frantic and abandoned dissipation. It was popularly supposed
that these four days in Paris, twenty years ago, had so completely
unsettled M. Sisteron that life in Nyons had lost all zest for him. He
was perpetually hungering for the delirious joys of the metropolis;
even the collection of taxes no longer afforded him the faintest
gratification. Every inhabitant of Nyons was secretly proud of being
able to claim so dare-devil a roysterer as a fellow-townsman. The
memory of those rumored four hectic days in Paris clung round him like
a halo; it became almost a pleasure to pay taxes to so celebrated a
character. M. Sisteron was short, paunchy, bald, and bearded. He was a
model husband and a pattern as a father. I am persuaded that he had
spent those four days in Paris in the most blameless and innocuous
fashion, living in the cheapest hotel he could find, and, after the
manner of the people of Nyons, never spending one unnecessary franc.
Still, the legend of his lurid four days, and of the amount of
champagne he had consumed during them, persisted. In moments of
expansion, his intimate friends would dig him in the ribs, remembering
those four feverish days, with a facetious, "Ah! vieux polisson de
Sisteron, va! Nous autres, nous n'avons pas fait des farces a Paris
dans notre jeunesse!" to M. Sisteron's unbounded delight. It was in the
genuine spirit of Tartarin de Tarascon, with all the mutual
make-believe on both sides. His wife, Mme. Sisteron, was fond of
assuring her friends that she owed her excellent health to the fact
that she invariably took a bath twice a year, whether she required it
or not.

The other members of the cercle were also mostly short, tubby,
black-bearded, and olive-complexioned. When not engaged in playing
"manille" for infinitesimal points, they would all shout and
gesticulate violently, as only Southern Frenchmen can, relapsing as the
discussion grew more heated into their native Provencal, for though
Nyons is geographically in Dauphine, climatically and racially it is in
Provence. In Southern France the "Langue d'Oil," the literary language
of Paris and Northern France, has never succeeded in ousting the
"Langue d'Oc," the language of the Troubadours. From hearing so much
Provencal talked round me, I could not help picking up some of it. It
was years before I could rid myself of the habit of inquiring quezaco?
instead of "qu'est ce que c'est?" and of substituting for "Comment cela
va-t-il?" the Provencal Commoun as? I found, too, that it was unusual
elsewhere to address people in our Nyons fashion as "Te, mon bon!"

Those swarthy, amply waistcoated, voluble little men were really very
good fellows in spite of their excitability and torrents of talk.

The Southern Frenchmen divide Europe into the "Nord" and the "Midi."
The "Nord" is hardly worth talking about, the sun never really shines
there, and no garlic or oil is used in cookery in those benighted
regions. The town of Lyons is considered to be in the "Nord," although
we should consider it well in the south of France. To the curious in
such matters, it may be pointed out that the line of demarcation
between "Nord" and "Midi" is perfectly well defined. In travelling from
Paris to Marseilles, between Valence and Montelimar, the observer will
note that quite abruptly the type of house changes. In place of the
high-pitched roof of Northern Europe the farm-houses suddenly assume
flat roofs of fluted tiles, with projecting eaves, after the Italian
fashion; at the same time the grey-green olive trees put in a first
appearance. Then you are in the "Midi," and any black-bearded,
olive-complexioned, stumpy little men in the carriage will give a sigh
of relief, for now, at last, the sun will begin to shine.

Nyons had been for two hundred years a Huguenot stronghold, so for a
French town an unusual proportion of its inhabitants were Protestants,
and there was, oddly enough, a colony of French Wesleyans there.

M. Ducros' father had been the Protestant pasteur of Nyons for
forty-four years. He was eighty-six years old, and on week-days the old
gentleman dozed in the sun all day, and was quite senile and gaga. On
Sundays, no sooner had he ascended the pulpit than his faculties seemed
to return to him, and he would preach interminable but perfectly
coherent sermons with a vigour astonishing in so old a man, only to
relapse into childishness again on returning home, and to remain senile
till the following Sunday.

The Ducros lived in a large farm-house on the outskirts of the town. It
was a farm without any livestock, for there is no grass whatever in
that part of France, and consequently no pasture for cattle or sheep.
Every one in Nyons kept goats for milk, and, quaintly enough, they fed
them on the dried mulberry leaves the silkworms had left over. For
every one reared silkworms too, a most lucrative industry. The French
speak of "making" silkworms (faire des vers-a-soie). Lucrative as it
is, it would never succeed in England even if the white mulberry could
be induced to grow, for successful silkworm rearing demands such
continual watchfulness and meticulous attention as only French people
can give; English people "couldn't be bothered" to expend such minute
care on anything they were doing.

Every foot of the Ducros' property was carefully cultivated, with
vineyards above on the terraced hillside, olive-yards below, and
mulberry trees on the lower levels. Our black mulberry, 

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