THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORl^D RA^HOND BLATHWyCV'T f)5 ■^^■'TZcJ- v^ CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY — <_^^^ 7 X . Ty^^U. L4f-y^Jt~. ^rf.J'J:'/ <£-Z^-<-t^5i--5!:. - /f^e Cornell University Library CT788.B64 A3 Through life and round the world being olin 3 1924 029 873 068 The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029873068 rhoio dy] [Sivaine, Ne7u Eotid Street. THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD BEING THE STORY OF MY LIFE By RAYMOND BLATHWAYT WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY MORTIMER MENPES NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 661 FIFTH AVENUE I917 A (All rights reserved) TO HERBERT BEERBOHM TREE AND HARRY DE WINDT TWO OF MY OLDEST AND DEAREST FRIENDS I DEDICATE THIS BOOK CONTENTS CHAPTER I. UNDER THE OLD OAK-TREE . PAffiE 13 II. BOULOGNE AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT . . 29 III. THE WHEELS OF CHANCE . . . -43 IV. A GLIMPSE INTO A CURATE'S LIFE AND MIND . 58 V. A GLIMPSE INTO A CURATE'S LIFE AND MIND {cotltd.) 83 VI. A GLIMPSE INTO A CURATE'S LIFE AND MIND (contd.) IO3 VII. HAS THE CHURCH FAILED ? VIH. MY PLUNGE INTO JOURNALISM IX. SOME PEOPLE I HAVE MET X. MY SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA XI. IN MORTIMER MENPES' STUDIO XII. AMONG THE BOOKS AT HATCHARDS' XIII. THE ROMANCE OF A LONG DEAD DAY ■ 137 • 152 . 167 . 180 • 205 . 227 . 240 XIV. HOW SETON-KARR DISCOVERED THE GARDEN OF EDEN ...... 253 XV. COSTUME AND CELEBRITIES . XVI. BEHIND THE SCENES . XVII. OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY 9 • 263 . 28s • 306 lo CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XVIII. OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY (continued) ■ 33^ XIX. CHOTA-HAZRI ROUND THE WORLD . . 35^ XX. WITH HUGH BENSON IN JERUSALEM . 37^ XXI. MYSTICISM, MATERIALISM, AND MESMERISM 393 XXII. THE THINGS WE REMEMBER BEST • 4°4 XXIII. THE THINGS THAT MATTER IN THE END . 4^1 INDEX ...... 435 ILLUSTRATIONS RAYMOND BLATHWAYT ..... Frontispiece THE DESK IN THE LIMEHOUSE WINDOW WHERE CHARLES DICKENS MADE HIS RIVER-SIDE NOTES FOR " OUR MUTUAL FRIEND "... Facing page 83 (From a paiatingr by W. W. CoUins, kindly lent by Dr. Frank Comer) REV. R. J. CAMPBELL . ... Page IO4 G. F. WATTS ....... 166 LADY DOROTHY NEVILL . . „ 2o6 CECIL RHODES ... . . „ 226 THE PICTURE GALLERY, DYRHAM PARK . Facing page 24O (By permission of Country Life) SIR HENRY IRVING ..... Page 286 MR. H. B. IRVING . . . • „ 392 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD CHAPTER I UNDER THE OLD OAK-TREE Tityre tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi, Silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avena. The housemaid danced with Pedro the murderer, the nursemaid footed it Hghtly enough with Godfrey the forger, " Cookie " looked smilingly on from the kitchen door, I laboriously turned the handle of the barrel-organ, whilst my little brother played with the tiny red-jacketed monkey, and the wearied Italian organist slept the sleep of the just beneath the great oak-tree that so delighit- fuUy overhung our lawn, and beneath the dancing shadows of which I used to lie and dream and weave the golden threads which lend such enchanting romance to the innocent days of childhood. That is almost the earliest incident that arises to my mind from amjong the dim and half -forgotten memories of an unusually crowded past. For my dear father, v\^ho was a country clergyman, had, some years before the occasion to which I refer, been presented to a convict chaplaincy by my mother's cousin. Sir George Grey, a famous Victorian Secretary of State and the grandfather of Viscount Grey of Fallodon, who was, indeed, mainly brought up by him ; and hence it was that all my, earhest associations were connected with that ciurious convict system with which, fortunately, for them, so few of the English people are in any way acquainted whatever. And yet though my earliest 14 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD memories are of long lines of gtey-clad, broad'-arrow- stamped men, heavily tramping along' the lovely sunlit roads of an unusually wild and beautiful part of England, they are not sorrowful memories, nor are they in the least soiled or tainted with suggiestion of crime, or wickedness, or evil-mindedness. It is a remarkable fact that these convicts appeared to have realized for them- selves the old classic adjuration. Maxima honos pueris debetur ; for never once — though owing to the inevitable carelessness or indifference of the ordinary nursemaid 1 was thrown into constant association with the men, specially chosen and well-conducted men, however,' who formed what was known as the garden gang, and who were assigned to the leading, officers, such as the Governor, the Chaplain, the Deputy -Governor, and the two doctors, assigned to them in somewhat the same fashion as convicts were assigned to the earlier settlers in Australia — I can never once remember any single one of those men making use of a bad word in my hearing. On the contrary, it was Godfrey the forger who taught me a little child's prayer whiohl I have never forgotten, and which ran as follows : — And now I lay nie down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep ; And if I die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take. It was Pedro, the S.outh American Spaniard, who had stabbed a man to death in London, but who escaped the death penalty to which he had been sentenced owing to certain extenuating circumstances, who first revealed to me the fact that Mary was the Queen of Heaven', a piece of theology which much startled and horrified my father, who was, of all Evangelicals that I have met, absolutely the most strict and undeviating, and it was that same occurrence which led to a much sterner supervision on the part of my pastors and masters thaJii I had previously been subjected to. It is a curious and pleasant reflec- tion, however, that I can remember nothing but what UNDER THE OLD OAK-TREE 15 was good and pure in my quite unavoidable association with those poor convicts. As a matter of fact, it was an association very much on a par with that of Eton and Harrow boys with their fathers' grooms in the stables of a big country house, and really fraught with neither more nor less evil than that is. Many of this garden gang were quite elderly men, though Pedto and Godfrey, my special friends, were comparatively young men, and some of them had known a far different existence in the outside world. One I remember was a famous baronet, of whom his friends — and they were legion — had nothing to say but what was wholly admirable ; another, a splendidly hand- some, white-haired old man, who used, as a special privilege, to act as clerk to my father in the chapel, and who, as a still further privilege, was allowed to wear his own pince-nez, had been mayor of a great city in the North, and had actually entertained Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort to luncheon at his own house ; whilst a third, who played the organ in chapel, was a Public School and University man. It will therefore be under- stood that such men could behave themselves, in a general way, quite as well as, if not better than, many free and happy men outside. O 'Donovan Rossa — though he came many years later — wa.s another of these unfortunates, and he, though a very convinced and resolute Fenian, was in many respects a treally fine fellow ; whilst Michael Davitt, whom I met thirty years later at a Cabinet luncheon in Australia, was one of the most charming men I ever knew. Pedro and Godfrey, between them, made me a beautiful little garden, "all to my very own self," as Godfrey told me ; and he dug out a tiny little lake in it, and then went into the woods that lay so thick around the garden — a kind of primeval forest which was crammed with wild North American Indians, and centauxs, and lions, and South Sea savages, and the most fearsome dragkans — and cut me some bulrushes, out of which he fashioned some little boats, which he sailed upon the water for me. Godfrey was very good to me and really one of th^ 1 6 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD heroes of my childhood, and so what more natural than that I should help him to escape when I was asked to do so ! He was quite innocent ! He told me so himself, so of course it was true ; and " Cookie," who had a very soft spot in her heart for the big, handsome, good-natured young man, whose real and undeniable good looks and natural charm of disposition no cropping or shaving or dressing up in hideous garb could possibly disguise or do away with, determined one day she would help him to escape. So, with her finger on her lips to ensiue my silence, having previously conjured 'me by the most blood- curdling oaths to deathless secrecy, she flew upstairs one memorable November evening and returned with a long black clerical coat anid a pair of old black trousers, which my father had discarded, and flung them to Godfrey, with : "Go into the pantry, Jem, me darlin,' and put 'em on there, and look your sharpest." And Godfrey disappeared for five of the longest minutes I have ever known ; and then out came a tall, very hand- some curate, and I said, " Oh, Godfrey, you do look nice ! " And Godfrey crammed some bread and cheese the housemaid had got ready for him into his pocket and said, as he kissed us all one after the other : " Good-bye, Cookie, I am off. Good-bye, Master Raymond dear ; I'll do the same for you one of these dkys, you see if I don't. And don't you forget to say that little prayer I taught you every night, and keep some salt always in your pocket and let me know if you ever catch a bird with it." And he was off into the dark night and down the dark, wet hill that led him to the canal and to the railway station, safe for London Town. And I sat by the kitchen fire and read stories in the red-hot coals, and almost thought I saw a giant behind the pantry door ; and then I nodded|, amdi I thiiik I must have fallen asleep, when suddenly I was wide awake, and the housemaid said in a thrilling voice, " Hark ! what's that?" And my heart beat till I was nearly suffocated, and the great prison bell dashed and clanged in the foggy winter night, and I heard the warders UNDER THE OLD OAK-TREE \^ dashing by ; and suddenly a gain went off, and " Cookie " began to cry hysterically. And then the nursemaid took me upstairs and btushed' rriy h^r, arid I went down for the usual few minutes before dinner, and my bedtime, to look at picture-books in the drawing- room. And then my father came in. " Godfrey's escaped," he said ; " I'm afraid he'll get the ' cat,' poor wretch, if they catch him." And then I went up to bed, perfectly ill with excitement and anxiety. I was only six after all, and \ cried myself to sleep ; and when nurse woke me in the morning she said : " They ain't caught poor old Godfrey, Master Raymond, and pray they never will, nasty beasts ! " But, alas ! a week after my father opened The Times, and after a moment or two he read us out a piece which said that a young policeman had met a man walkin,g in a street in London, and he went up to him and said, " You are James Godfrey — ^yolu've g|o:t to come with me." And oh, how " Cookie " and all of us cried ! And " Cookie " said : " There, Master Raymond, you 'aven't caught your bird yet, but they caught poor old Godfrey." One curious and really rather dreadful part of it was that my aunt, Mrs. Chlarles- Blathwayt, who was staying; in the house with us at the time, wias thie sister of the then Secretary of State for the Home Department, Mr. Gathome-Hardy, afterwards Earl of Cranbriook, w^h'o was actually, ex officio, the head of the whole Convict Department ! This momentous fact I iwas, of course, too young to realize at the time, but the servants and I kept our dark secret sO' well that it was not till I told my dear father the whole story in igoi that he realized to the full the appalling but not wholly unhumorous significance of the occasion. 1 have said that we lived amidst beautiful surroundings, and I rather desire to emphasize that fact, for no one can estimate to their fullest extent the value and import- ance of early associations and surroundings. My childish memories are of wonderful summer cfeys, when never a cloud dimmed the sky and the scent of the pine -woods was always in the air, and the sun used to set behind a. 1 8 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD a vast range of dark blue hills, which were frequently dotted with the white tents of soldiers engaged in the great summer and autumn manoeuvres which began to be so popular in those far-off days. We were a singu- larly happy family, though we were always very poor, and I never even went to a pantomime until I was well over twenty years of age. Our greatest treat, on our very rare expeditions to^ town, was a visit to the British Museum, the National Gallery, Madame Tussaud's, or the Christy Minstrels. I don't suppose my father ever had more than £500 a year at any time of his career, and I am quite sure he had never dined in a smart restaurant in all his life — for one thingi, I don't think they existed for anybody in those days, and for another, he would have loathed them and all their associations and their inherent vulgarity. For he was a great gentleman, in the most splendid meaning of that ridiculously wrongly used and absurdly abused word to-day. He was so aloof from, and, to toy childish idea — and, indeed, to the idea I hold almost as strongly to-day as I did then — so far above, the ordinary run of people that I cannot imagine him in connection with them at all ; he was simply a scholar, an omnivorous reader, an artist, an exceedingly fine preacher, and', with his brothers, a certain Captain Jennings -Bramley, who was Governor of the prison, and the late Lord Leconfield', whom we knew in later years, far and away the most distinlglui shed -looking! m;an I have ever seen — and that in a day when " distinction " was a much commoner thing in the streets of London than it is to-day. It is a curious thing that whilst women ,have enormously advanced and improved, physically as well as mentally, men as a rule have just as curiously deteriorated. But my father and his brothers were extra- ordinarily distinguished to look at. People always turned to look after them in the street. I remember once, when I was about ten years of age, I had come up to town as a special treat with my father, and I walked down Piccadilly with him and my Uncle Charles, and we suddenly met Mr. Disraeli, as he was then, and my father whispered to me, "Look, Raymond, here's Mr. Disraeh." UNDER THE OLD OAK-TREE ig And as the great mian passed us, with a very scrutinizinig gaze at the two tall and stately clergymen, I turned to look at him, and lo ! he had turned also and was gazing hard at us. That was my one and only glimpse of that splendidly picturesque Victorian figure, and a glimpse I shall never forget. I was walking the other day with Captain Harry de Windt and Miss Elaine Inescort, the charming actress, and as we crossed St. James's Square we passed a singularly distinguished-looking man — all of the olden time — and our fair friend said — " What a splendid -looking person 1 He's a regular Colonel Newcome I " "There, Harry," I said, "isn't that true? He is exactly the type of man we used to see by the dozen in the sixties and the seventies, and that you, never ;see nowadays save and except as a sort of dim survival." I hope no one will laugh at me for saying all this, though if a son may not admire his own father, I don't know whom he may admire. Of my mothet I will say no more — at present, at all events — than that she is the greatest memory I have. There are people and memories too sacred for words, and my memory and thoughts of her are of that nature. With my father, of course, it is somewhat different. He stands, and will stand for all time, so far as I am concerned, as quite one of the most remarkable men I have ever known. I have known far cleverer men, of course, and in certain respects much more lovable men, but I have never known, among all the wonderful and remarkable and distinguished men I have met — and I have met more than most — I have never known one who stood so strikingly apart from his fellows as he always did. Very cold and proud and very aloof and reserved — so reserved that I hardly ever knew him to lunch or dine out with a single living soul in all my life, and so proud that he would never ajSk, a favour of any of our relations, several of whom held very high office in the country — he nevertheless was characterized by perfect simplicity of manner and address. Either he or his brother Charlesj 20 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD could easily have been bishops hiad they chosen to exert themselves but ever so little, for they possessed excep- tional qualifications for high dignity ; but they were simply too proud and too indifferent and too unambitious ever to move a finger to help themselves or any of their family. And I like to think of it, even though we were in our family so really poor that sometimes, with one son at Oxford and another at Cambridge, it was hard work to make both ends meet. My uncle Charles had married money, and, with some other of my more worldly- wise relatives, represented what was to oiu: simple ideas the really wealthy side of life ; indeed, I believe one of my avmt's brothers was one of the few millionaires England had produced before the American and South African Croesuses had begun to flood our shores. So we grew up in a world of simplicity of which the modem day knows little or nothing, and which, I suppose, it would heartily despise. My father began teaching us Greek and Latin at an age when the modern boy hasn't even begun to tackle his English Grammar, and I was caned for a false quantity before I was eight. And it did me all the good in the world too. And another thing : my father was never what is known as a " pal " to his children, and that, too, in my estimation, was all to the good. I don't believe one bit in the modern system of calling your father " old chap." Heavens ! I wonder what would have happened to me if I had so appallingly forgotten myself I 1 don't wish to bear unduly hard upon the present system ; 1 am sure it has its good points, just as I am equally certain it has its bad, but I siimply neither like it nor beUeve in it. Some- times, indeed, it is nothing less than disastrous in its results. A year or two ago^ I wlas lunching with some friends and their son, a boy of fifteen or sixteen, home from a very famous Public School for the holidays. " Let me have some champagne, mother," he said. " Oh no, darling, I can't ; it's too early." " Oh, don't be a fool, mother ; let me have some." " No, darling ; I really don't think it's good for you." UNDER THE OLD OAK-TREE 21 " You filthy swine! " he cried, his face black with passion . There was a dead silence. I looked at his father, earnestly hoping that he would then and there break every bone in his body. Oh no, not the " pal " father 1 Not a bit of it ! " Oh, Harry, you shouldn't talk likq that to your mother, you know." That was all he said. I leaned over towards the brute and! I said, " My father would have killed me if I had said that to my. mother I " Some of my modem readers will marvel at my emotion on this occasion. Well, they may. I can only say that there are times when one could commit murder and be justified in committing it. That was one of them for me. I don't pretend for a moment that all the youths of to-day are like that — the very reverse is the case. I cannot emphasize this fact too strongly, and not to do so would be gtossly tmfair. Nor would I suggest that the " pal " father is always so criminally forbearing. But at the same time there is far too much of that kind of thing about. Twice within the last three years I have seen supposedly well-bred children, in a towering passion, fling a pack ,of cards in their parents' faces — one a boy who actually cut his mother's lip open with the violence of his passion, and the other a girl who dashed all her cards full into the face of her father. And in each case the children, each of whom was over fourteen years of age and who ought to have been most severely punished, were not even reprimanded ! Well, all this is to say that though my father was very severe, very often too harsh with us, and sometimes hardly just in his punishments, yet he always commanded and merited and retained for life our admiration and respect, arid this to his diyinig' day, which occurred only a few days before the death of King Edward ; and it must indeed be rare to find a large family of children which was so proud of, and so devoted' to thie very last to, a father who never in the best sense of the word failed them when they required him most. And in a way— though I am ignorant enough now. '2 2 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD Heaven knows ! — he and my dear mother educated us so splendidly. Our Latin and Greek lessons never bored us, because we learned the story and the romance and the history and the geography of them at one and the same time ; and when I was only seven years old my mother used to read to me such a book as Motley's " History of the Dutch Republic," or Prescott's histories of the Mexicans and' the Peruvians. But it was not so much the actual lessons or the subjects she chose as the whole tone and spirit of her instruction, and the refine- ment which, like a halo, encircled it all;, leaving behind an undying memory of indefinable charm and the most delicate romance. And it was she who used to read to me that wonderful Dream, that classic of En'gilish literature, though I was too young to appreciate any- thing more than its stories of the giants, Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress " ; it was she who initiated me, later on in my childhood, into the delicate beauties of George Herbert's " Temple " and Shakespeare's " Tem- pest " and Spenser's " Faerie Queene." I can never hear of Clovis, or Charlemagne, or St. Louis of France without thinking of mother's lessons to me from Mrs. Markham's famous French histories, with their pretty steel and wood engraving's ; nor can I even to-day witness Martin Harvey's beautiful performance in " The Only Way, " without recalling her simple recital of Dickens's famous " Tale of Two Cities," with which she accompanied Mrs. Markham's account of the French Revolution. And when she read me the " Tales of a Grandfather," she would also give me her own personal memories of Sir Walter Scott, whom she knew when she was a very small child, and she would try and adapt his Scottish stories, where they fitted in with the particular piece of history she was reading, to my childish understanding. And talking of Scott reminds me I may as well break off for a moment to enlarge upon what I can recall of her memories of the greatest man Scotland has ever produced. I recall the wonderful enthusiasm that Sir Herbert Tree aroused in Edinburgh one night at a grand dinner which was given to him by the Pen and Pencil UNDER THE OLD OAK-TREE 23 Club ten or twelve years ago, when I sat next to him, and he, at the end of his speech, which was quoted in full in all the Scottish papers next morning, read them an extract from my mother's letter which she had written me, all unconscioxis that it would ever reach others' eyes or ears than mine, thoug^h', of course, she had not the slightest objection to my dear old friend thus making use of her stories, which came in' with extra- ordinary appropriateness in a speech dealing so charm- ingly and sympathetically with Edinburgh's literary and artistic associations and reminiscences. " You must let me bring that into my speech to-night, Blathwayt," said Tree. " Wire to your mother and ask her permission." " No," I replied ; " that would frighten her into a fit. There's no earthly harm in your doing so, and I'll send her the Scotsman the morn's morn " — Tree and I always speak broad Scots in Edinburgh and with vthe most violent brogue when we are in Dublin, as we some- times are together. My mother, in begging me to go to a certain square in Edinburgh where my grandfather had lived, and where Scott often dined with him and such Scottish celebrities of that day as the Duke of Buccleuch, the eccentric Earl of Buchan, and the Con- stables, re -told, and told it accurately, the famous story of Mrs. Siddons at my grandfather's dinner-table. The footman had brought her a glass of water, and, looking at him very solemnly, the great queen of tragedy said, in her most impressive style, " I said ' porter,' young man, not ' water ' I " There is a well-known engraving; which depicts Sir Walter Scott giving a reading of one of his new books at Abbotsford, with, amongst other Scottish worthies of the day, the Etterick Shepherd, James Hogg, seated at ScoVs feet, and John Gibson Lockhart and my grand- father seated at the end of the table. A few years ago I was staying in Cardiff with that delightful Scotsman Sir John Duncan, the proprietor of the South Wales News — alas ! that he has quitted a world that was always the happier and better for his 24 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD genial and noble presence — and he told me of an ag«d " brither Scot," wellnigh a century old, who was living out at Roath, and advised me to go and see him, as he was full of stories of Sir Walter, who had been his father's friend and whom he himself also remembered distinctly. So I went to see the dear old man, and I am glad now I did. I had no sooner told him who I was than he said : " Yes, I remember now. And I remember I was walking out to Abbotsford when I was a big boy one day and your grandfather passed me driving in his phaeton and he gave me a lift out to Sir Walter's, and when we got there we found Sir Walter reading in the library, with yoiu- dear mother and her sister playing with the dogi on the hearthrug — they couldn't have been more than five or six at the time." Piercing through that wonderful golden mist of memories and romance which always enshrouds the far-off past of my childhood's days, it seems to me that every- thing centres round that beautiful old oak which dominated our whole garden. The sound of its leaves fluttering in the breeze was the first sound that greeted me on waking in the morning, and it was beneath its shadow that I first realized the golden arrows shot by the early sun, and after my lessons I used to fall asleep to the eternal music of the wind among its branches. Shadowed by its protecting care, I read the first book I ever read all by myself — ^Marryatt's " Masterman Ready," a book that not only coloured all my after -life, but that added tenfold to the interest of those wanderings of mine through the after -years all over the world. To this hour I can never behold the palms bending to the strong sea breeze on the scented shores of Ceylon or in some little West Indian forest without recalling the delightful pictures in " Masterman Ready," any more than I can behold the magnificent architectural glories of a sunset in the Indian Ocean, with all its marvellous outline and its exquisite translucency of atmosphere and its gorgeous colouring', without thinking of that other favourite of my childhood, R. M. Ballantyne's " Coral Island." So extraordinarily vivid and powerful are one's UNDER THE OLD OAK-TREE 25 earliest memiaries and associations thait one can never get wholly rid of ohildhiood's past, and if y,oiu are fortunate enough to have had such a childhood as mine you never want to. And then it was imder that tree that I read my first two novels — surreptitiously, of course — Mrs. Radclyffe's famous " Mysteries of Udolpho," with that thrilling and delightful sentence which has lingered with me all my Ufe, " The castle clock struck one! " and the other was " Lady Audley's Secret," by Miss Braddon, all of whose books were my joy for years and years! of my early life. I have maundered on a long time about this same childhood, but it is not wi,thout its special meaning and significance. Upon your childhood, to a very great extent, depends all your after-life. And what is so sad a feature of to-day is that to a very great extent children, and especially the children of the upper classes, appear to have no childhood at all, for they are absolutely robbed of it. They are little mannikins only too often, going out to restaurants and theatres and' parties and the Lord knows what 1 Simple pleasures don't appeal to them in the least. Little simple pleasures — the simpler the better — that even to-d^y delight Herbert Tree and myself bore the young people stiff. And the heart that has lost its simplicity is dead indeed. But I must hurry on, or this immensely lengthy chapter will never come to an end. Poor as we were, of course Etouj Harrow, Winchester, and Rugby, to which so many of one's friends and relatives went, were hopelessly out of the question for me and my brothers, so we went, some of us — for we were a pretty large family, of which I was the eldest — to a very admirable private school, run, on Public School lines as far as possible, by the Rev. C. W. Arnold, a near relative of the famous Arnold of Rugby, and, like him, a very prince among men. I can see him now, tall and very upright, clad in cap and gown, striding into the school hall to take the Sixth Form in their Greek play, ;. I can see him, as clearly ais I cpuld then almost, batting at the wicket and scoring more runs sometimes than even the famous professionalsi Pooley, 26 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD Jupp, and Julius Caesar, who used to come down and play at our annual match. He it was who* took hold of my, brother John and made such' a fine cricketer of liim that somie yeiars after Lord Harris wanted him to play in the Kent Eleven. It was under him thalt I 'first heard of a wonderful young cricketer, who in the early seventies had already become famous, named W. G. Grace . Ah I those wonderful initials " W. G. " I Surely the most marvellous, the most romantic, and the most memory- evoking initials that were ever known ! Where on earth has " W. G." and his score not been talked of, and by how many eager generations of boys has not his personality been regarded as almost more divine than human I I Jiavc heard him discussed at messes in India, on battle -cruisers in Hongkong and Jamaica ; I have talked him over with veld farmers in S,outh Africa and with hard-working Cabinet Ministers in far Australia, and wherever willow is king " W. G." has been, and almost still remains, monarch of all he surveys. To this day I can never hear the thud of the bat, upon a hot summer noon, without a flashing memory of the heroic figure and the bearded face of the genial giant as he would stride across the pitch at Lord's, or of that famous morning in 1892 when, at long last, I sat and talked with the hero, the classic, fabled hero of my boyish days, and he, revolving many memories, like the sporting Sir Bedivere that ho was, told me the story of his vast and wandering life. I am always glad that my old headmaster was the famous cricketer he was, for it was at his hands I first learned what little of the game I know. He was an ideal man for boyhood's impressionable days : very tall and upstanding, with ligiht, rather curly hair and a noble forehead ; a distinguished preacher, and altogiether a notable personality as he stood in the pulpit of the tiny school chapel and preached those simple and yet stirring sermons to us boys, which were so curiously suggestive and reminiscent of those other sermons preached forty years before in Rugby Chapel by his illustrious relative. UNDER THE OLD OAK-TREE 27 and the memory of which has been for ever immortalized by Tom Hughes in his classic schoolboy story, " Tom Brown's Schooldays." And wtell can I remember his coming into the school one June morning, just before the great Franco -Prussian War burst like a thunder-cloud upon the Continent, and saying to us all : " Boys, you will be sorry to hear that Charles Dickens died yester- day." All the same, however, my most vivid and my most sacred memories cling round, and are associated and linked up together with, the rustling leaves and the darting rays of sunshine always flashing' through that old oak-tree upon the garden lawn. Underneath that tree, as I have already said, I read my childhood's favourite works, the works so popular in that day — " Ivanhoe," and " Pickwick," and " The Wide, Wide World," and "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and " The Heir of Redclyffe," and " East Lynne," and all of Ballantyne and Marryatt and Mayne Reid that I could get hold of. It was here that I used to lie and dream of other worlds than that which I then knew, and here that as a little boy I sat and listened, one very far-off day, to my father and Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Kingsley discussing a series of popular lectures for the imfortimate convicts, all part of a plan for ameliorating and reforming their dreary lives, but a plan which, being too charming and ideal for the official mind, was speedily trampled under foot by the authorities . And yet how the poor wretches enjoyed those lectures they were afforded the opportunity of hearing I Even now, after more than fifty years, their cheers as they listened to Charles Kingsley's stirring words, or to the charm of Tom Hughes's simple eloquence, are ringing in my memory. But my days beneath the old oak-tree were, all uncon- sciously to myself, drawing to a dose, and a summer day came when I woke to hear its gentle murmuring for the last time, and for the last time the sun shot his golden arrows through the shimmering leaves upon the grass at my feet. For my father had been appointed British Chaplain in Boulogne, and thither we went in the late 28 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD summer of 1872 and my childhood's days were over for ever, surely the most golden childhood, because so simple and so- perfectly natural a childhood, that I have ever heard of ; and I bade good-bye to the old oak-tree for good and all. I went and sat beneath that tree only a few weeks ago ; it hasn't changed a bit. But those who sat there and played with me, where, indeed, are they to-day? And when they read these words, those of them who still wander midst these glimpses of the moon, what will their memories be of the days that will never come again? I can never forget the tumultuous morning of our departure — the brilliant sunshine, the sinister walls of the great prison outlined against an azure sky, the sparkling drops of dew still bedecking the scented roses, and then the long line of imiformed warders, many of them heroes of the Crimean War, standing at strict atten- tion, as my father and mother and all of us drove by in a huge wagonette hired for the occasion, and which all my life nearly had carried me on our little picnics and excursions ; and then the great burst of cheering, started and led by that splendidly handsome, gallant soldier Captain Bramley, the Governor, as we slowly passed down the line. Even the stem lips of my father quivered, and my mother was quite undisguised in her emotion. A turn in the road, and my childhood was swept out of my life for ever. CHAPTER II BOULOGNE AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT Boulogne in the seventies was a charming town, and I can never forget my first impressions of it as the dome of the cathedral sprang into view from the steamer's deck and one caught one's first glimpse of the far-famed Column of Napoleon and the still better known lighthouses at the end of the two piers, between which the steamer, storm-tossed and wave-worn sixty seconds before, glides so smoothly and so calmly to her berth in the odorous harbour. And Boulogne then was more picturesque by far than it is to-day, and much more choice in its summer visitors and immeasurably more interesting in its all- the-year-roimd English residents. The Cockney tripper practically knew it not at all, and the perfectly poisonous holiday-makers from Lancashire and Yorkshire had probably never even heard of it. Some people will find fault with my vigour of phraseology : all I can say is that he who has seen the Lancashire and Yorkshire tripper at his or her worst, as I have seen them time and again, will agree with me that the adjective " poisonous " is absolutely a mild term to apply to them. I speak of them as I have seen them before the war. I rejoice to think that in the battle line they are very Paladins. For the matter of that, I can well imagine that the heroes of Cr^cy and Agincourt may have been quite distasteful in the piping days of peace. But Boulogne in the seventies was specially interesting to a very young fellow, only seventeen, like myself, from other points of view beyond the merely pictorial, though its wonderful old ramparts, and its pretty avenue of trees in the Tintelleries, its 29 30 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD glorious old churches and the walls of the Haute Ville so redolent of the stormy days of Godfrey de Bouillon, and the belfry and the beautiful old chateau at the comer of the ramparts, appealed to my sense of the romantic and historic to a quite remarkable extent. At the same time, I frankly confess it was the social aspect of the place that so attracted! a boy who had hitherto been brought up in a comparatively lonely country district. As the children of the British Chaplain we naturally got to know most of the very large British colony pretty quickly, and we were asked out here and there and every- where. Even to-day I recall the names of my friends and companions of those golden far-off days. Colonel Webster -Wedderburn, with his sons and his beautiful daughter Violet, who subsequently became Lady Savile of Rufford Abbey, who died only a few years or so ago, were amongst the people we knew best ; and then there were Colonel and Mrs. Darling and their son Ralph, a great pal of mine, and Grace, their handsome, golden - haired daughter ; and the really wonderfully good-looking family the Snows, one of the girls of which family sub- sequently married Mr. Jloyle, of Cairo and Port Said, and who was long famed, and deservedly so, as the most beautiful woman between here and India ; and then there were the Traill -Simpsons, one of the daughters of whom married the present Lord Lauderdale. There was Lady Cecil Gordon, whose daughters used to stay with us and make up a very merry party at what served us as our very quiet vicarage in the Rue de la Paix. I must not forg-et the Wellesleys and their daughters, one of whom became Mrs. Arthur Wilson, of Tranby Croft (or was it Mrs. Charles Wilson, now Lady Nimburnholme ?) ; and, of course, the Hanbury -Williams girls. One very interesting couple consisted of old Sir William Hamilton and his wife, whom he had married when he was released from the French prison in which he had been interned as a British prisoner of war during the Napoleonic wars, his bride actually and most romantically being the daughter of the gaoler of the prison . He was acting as British Consul in the days of my father's chaplaincy. I recall the men BOULOGNE AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 31 about the place — a wild, harum-scarum crew some of them Were, but all splendid fellows^ and', of course, years and years older than myself : handsome Stewart- Muirhead ; Jerry Pocock, whose elder brother. Sir George Pocock, the Crimean hero, died only a few months ago ; Lionel Darell ; Ernest Prothero and his brother the Admiral ; Jemmy and Tony Safe ; Hayes - Sadleir ; and, amongst the older men. Lord Clarence Paget ; Colonel Coventry ; Sir Seton Gordon ; Colonel Ross, of some place or other in the Highlands (not Bladensberg, I know) ; Sir Gerald Fitzgerald, the Knig'ht of Glin ; a delightful person, and an Irish dean whose name I forget, with a lovely daughter, who subsequently became the wife of the well-known soldier Sir William Gatacre. And there was one wonderful man there, whom I will n,ot specify further than by saying that he was the Honourable , brother of the Earl of , one of the most romantic, if perhaps somewhat eccentric, personages that I have ever met. I can never forget one remarkable incident in which he was concerned. My father had to take a funeral, and he bade me accompany him in the carriage. Seated by father was Lord Clarence Paget, and, on the seat opposite, this gentleman, whom I will not name, and myself. My father was in his surplice and Cambridge hood, and my companion was clad in the costume of a Cavalier of Charles II's time, which was the garb he almost invariably walked about in : wide hat and drooping scarlet feather, wonderful frills and ruffs, and elaborate black silk stockings. We had to call at the house for the body. Arrived there, my father got out and walked into the house, a very ancient building. in a very poor quarter of the town. He came down a few minutes afterwards and said : " There will be no funeral to-day. The authorities have arrested the body for debt."- And then he turned to me and said : " You never heard of Crockford's, the great betting-place in St. James's Street— you are too young ; but that poor man was the son of the famous Crockford, and he inherited a large fortune from his father. A sad ending to such a life and inheritance ! " The cavalier nodded 32 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD his scarlet plume, practically blinding me for the moment, as he remarked : " Yes, it's enough to put any one off ever making another bet in this world." Let me break off here for a moment. When Sir H. B. Tree produced "The Last of the Dandies " in 1901 at His Majesty's, he gave a Very realistic stage presentment of Crockford's Betting Rooms in what is now the Devonshire Club, and I told him one night of the above incident. Just as we finished talking— we were in his sitting-room at the theatre — a very old lady was shown; in, and Mr. Tree, as he then was, said as he shook hands with her — " What is it you wish to see me about? " " Well, Mr. Tree," she replied, " your death scene of Count D'Orsay is all wrong." " Oh, I beg your pardon, my dear lady, it is not ; I have made all inquiries, and I assure you it is correct in every detail." " Nevertheless, Mr. Tree, it is not correct." " Well, really, madam," very gently replied the famous actor-manager, " I can assure you I am right and I speak with authority." " Possibly, Mr. Tree," answered the old lady ; " and yet I ought to know:. / am Count D'Orsay's daughter, and he died in my arms! " However, let me get back to the seventies and to Boulogne. The Cavalier was an object, ixaturally enough, of wonder and admiration wherever he went. In addition to wear- ing love-locks and drooping feathers and silk stockings and laces galore, he always enamelled his face most carefully, so as to hide the ravages of time, I presume ; but he was most sensitive to any comments upon his appearance, and as he was six feet two inches in height and a magnificent boxer, people were usually very careful not to offend his not unnatural susceptibilities in this direction. Once, however, he let himself go with a vengeance. He was walking down the front when three or four English sailors, just landed off a merchantman in the harbour, made some jeering remark about his bizarre BOULOGNE AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 33 appearance. One by one he took them on, and in less than five minutes the whole lot of them were flat on their backs in the dirty Boulonnaise gutter, while he walked imconcemedly on, airily dusting his soiled fingers with a delicately laced handkerchief. You never can judge by appearances ! It was a somewhat queer milieu, take it altogether, for my scholarly father and my saint -like mother ; but they kept always wholly aloof from it, though with some of the more sedate and elderly residents of the British colony they were naturally on terms of cordial friend- ship, whilst my father's singularly beautiful voice and preaching always crammed our church both summer and winter. Boys don't listen to sermons much — frankly, I think they would be rather prigs if they did— and I was no exception to the rule, but one sermon of my father's at this period I do remember. A friend of ours, a beautiful girl, the granddaughter of a certain General Douglas -Hamilton, died, and my father preached her funeral sermon, and I faintly recall his allusion to her grandfather, who, as a very young subaltern, had gone unscathed through the smoke and battle of Waterloo. It seemed, natiirally enough, so historic and far away to me that it was difficult to realize his charming grandchild had actually been one of our own playmates. And then there were the picnics out at Pont de Briques and the tennis parties at the Chateau d'Hardelot, where the Guys lived, one of whom, I fancy, has since developed into " Guy d'Hardelot," the writer of those charming songs with which we are so familiar to-day. Just about the middle of the seventies came the great rage for Moody and Sankey, and their tuneful, jingly hymns " Hold the Fort," " There were Ninety and Nine," " The Great Physician Now is Near." Well, these famous evangelists in 1875 created such a stir and such a sensa- tion as never was known in London. The Prince and Princess of Wales and half society and pretty well all the Cabinet of those days used to flock to hear them, and every one, in drawing-rooms even, and certainly in the Streets, used to sing and hum their famous tunes, an4 3, 34 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD their fame reached over even to Boulogne. And it came in this way : One day my father went downstairs, and there seated in the drawing-room were Mr. Stevenson Blackwood — afterwards Sir Stevenson Blackwood, Finan- cial Secretary to the Post Office — ^and his wife, the Duchess of Manchester, who were the parents of one destined to be far more famous than ever they were — Algernon Blackwood the author, of whom I will have much to say later on. And with them was their brother- in-law, Captain Charles Hobart, a son of the Earl of Buckinghamshire and brother of the famous Hobart Pasha, Admiral of the Turkish Fleet, and Mrs. Charles Hobart and their son Gus, who speedily became my great friend, and' who also, incidentally, became engaged shortly afterwards to my sister, then a girl of sixteen. Now it so happened that Captain Hobart (afterwards Hobart -Hampden) had, with his brothers, been at school with my father and the Tennysons, and he speedily, brought himself to father's memory ; and then he pro- posed that under my father's auspices they should hold a series of revival meetings in Boulogne — and not, perhaps, before they were required, for some of the British residents were a pretty hot lot in those days. So the meetings were held, and Mr. Black- wood and Captain Hobart and Sir Samuel Anderson, the Crown Solicitor of Dublin, and my father used to give the addresses. Whether the meetings did any good or not I really cannot say ; but they are memorable in my mind for the reason that they constituted a link, as it were, in the chain of association and reminiscences which joined up Lord Tennyson and his brothers and my father and his brothers and the Hobarts in school and college friendships right through nearly the whole of the last century— certainly from 1815, when the Battle of Waterloo was fought, to Wednesday, July 19, igi6, when I sat and talked with Algernon Blackwood, Sir Stevenson Blackwood's son, and cousin of my dear old friend Gus Hobart, who after all never married my sister, owing to the tragic fact that he went straight from g^dhur^t tQ Ipdia in 1876, where he died in Madras ft BOULOGNE AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 35 year later from a sudden attack of cholera, the very place where his uncle, Lord Hobart, was Governor. About this time, of coursei, I was frequently in London, which, from many points of view, was a very different place from what it is nowadays. It certainly was a much gayer place, though there were no restaurants hardly, or smart hotels, or music-halls, as we know them now, and only a very few theatres ; and telephones and taxis, of course, were not even invented. But silly, irritating little restrictions were not so painfully in evidence as they are to-day, and the somewhat grandmotherly rule of the L.C.C. had not overwhelmed a vastly more joyous city than that of which the present generation can have any idea, though I quite believe that in many respects we have progressed enormously. There was much more drinking in those days than one can imagine now, and extraordinary stories are told of the prowess of men in that direction in the seventies. I know of one case where a certain distinguished man asked a friend of mine, still hale and hearty, to dine with him. " Can you drink?'" said the would-be host. " Yes ; I think I can do my share," replied my friend, who told me this incident only a few days ago. On the night in question, when he arrived at his host's house he found he was the only guest. Opposite the master of the feast's seat stood in solemn array six bottles of port, and the same number of bottles stood opposite his own seat. Before they quitted that table, at some- where about three o'clock the next morning, those two heroes had consumed every single drop of the wine between them ! " Disgusting ! " some of my readers will say ; and I agree, though I think that total abstainers are sometimes inclined to intemperate addiction to the more solid pleasures of the table. But such an incident, though very rare even in those days, helps to illustrate and accentuate the tremendous gulf that yawns between the social life of the seventies and that of to-day. People were at once far more lax and far more rigid than could be even imagined nowadays. Take modern Nqncon- 36 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD formity, for instance. How extraordinarily that element of the community has widened and broadened out from that very rigid, cast-iron, and intolerant system which so characterized the latter half of Queen Victoria's reign ! To-day we find Free Churchmen of the type of Mr. A. K. Yapp, the secretary of that aforetime almost incredibly narrow-minded religious body known as the Y.M.C.A., actually hand-in-glove with Roman and High Anglican priests and arranging for Sunday evening sing-songs for our homeless soldiers with the leading lights of musical comedy — and more power to his elBow, I say, for so doing. But such laxity in the religious world would have been absolutely unthinkable in the seventies and eighties of last century. London is both better and worse than it was when I was careering through its sunny, golden streets in the days of which I write so wistfully and afTectioeately. And assuredly young men were far more exposed to temptations of many and varied kinds than I imagine they are or can be to-day — though at my age, of course, 1 know little or nothing of the life a modern young man about town leads or of the temptations to which he is exposed. I i'magine they are rather more " shepherded " than we ever were, or than we would ever have consented to be. At the same time, though I gladly realize that the drinking habits of the community are greatly modified from what they used to be, 1 am bound to acknowledge that even to-day the men who accomplish the greatest work for the Empire, and the men I most admire, are emphatically not teetotallers. But in the early seventies I was very yoimg and very heedless, and I don't suppose I shirked my " whack " any more than did my comrades, although nowadays and for many years past I am and have been almost a teetotaller. Amongst my friends in that far-off period was a kind of cousin of mine, a certain Captain Gljoine Turquand, in the Guards— a very smart person indeed (and, by the by, it was in 1872 that I first heard! the word " smart " used to describe ultra -fashionable society, 30 the word is not quite so modern as some people BOULOGNE AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 37 imagine"), who frequently figured as the hero of some of Ouida's famous novels. Gh-nne Turquand was a ^ery outstanding figure in London society just about that period, as also were " Charlie " Buller, of the 2nd Life Guards, and Charles Chase Parr, the Harrow cricketer, and Chandos-Pole ; and these men, with many others whom elderly men to-day will well remember at Jem Mace's boxing-saloon in St. James's Street, were in evidence all over the town and at ever>' available fimc- tion. I remember one well -known man about town, a connection of my own, bearing an historic name, who walked into a certain bar, and, catching a glimpse of a big picture of Queen Elizabeth, he said : " Oh, that's the old girl who beheaded my ancestor," and taking a revolver out of his hip -pocket, he forthwith put a bullet clean through the virgin Queen's right eye ! And then there were the Argyll Rooms, which were open for dancing all night long ; and Barnes's famous " Blue Posts " in the Haymarket, a very fashionable resort for the yoimg men of the period, when Piccadilly was crammed all night long with innumerable " soiled doves — ^and very loveh- women many of them were too — and everybody went home with the milk and a frightful headache. Not that I myself ever "painted the town red " ; I was far too delicate, and also far too reticent and resierved, even then, for such joyous episodes, but most of my friends were great artists at it. And it was just about this time, two or three -and -forty years ago, that I recall first hearing Miss \'esta Tilley singing at some place — I cant say where it was now — and I heard her only the other night, and, upon my word, she hardly looked any older than she did then. Temperance as regards drink has, thank goodness, made tremendous headway amongst men, though I really think the drink craze is far worse with women than ever it was when I was young. But the temperance of to-day is due rather to an appreciation of the laws of hygiene than to the absurdly fanatical — although I must, in fairness, own really earnest and well-meant — strivings of the t>-pical teetotallers, many of whom. 38 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD though devoted persons of lofty character, have told me quite frankly that they would far sooner let a wife or a friend or a child of theirs die than give them that drop of brandy which would save their lives. That I can only characterize as the most mistaken fanaticism. I honour them for the strength of their principles and the staunch- ness of their convictions, but I would draw the line at their literally murdering other people in order that their own souls, and possibly the souls of their unfortunate victims, may be unstained. There is no doubt, however, that the sobriety of to-day is a vast gain to the com- munity, especially when one compares the condition of the streets of to-day with what it was in the early seventies . And this brings me to the Isle of Wight, where, in the year 1875, my father was appointed to the living of Totland Bay, near Freshwater — another charming and beautiful home, and where the people, as they were in Boulogne, were of the most kindly and interesting description that one could possibly desire. To begin with, there were, first and foremost, the Tennysons. Alfred Tennyson was then, I think I may say with truth, incomparably one of the stateliest, most romantic, and most interesting figures in the whole world — not in England only, not only in literary or social circles, but absolutely the most interesting, the most famous, the most sought-after figure in the whole world. And I can think of no exception. He was a classic figure, almost as though he had stepped out of Homer or the .i^neid, or out of the pages of the Bible. I am not exaggerating. It was as one of the greatest figures of her own marvellous era, crowded with historic personages as it was^" the old Duke," Faraday, Kingsley, Gladstone, Disraeli — ^that Queen Victoria, who dearly loved him, regarded her Poet Laureate. What wonder, then, was it that to my youthful imagination he was, as he remains to-day, incomparably the greatest person I had then or have ever since met 1 The Tennyson household was remarkable and interesting, and I am quite sure the present Lord Tennyson, from whom' I received a beautiful BOULOGNE AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 39 letter on the death of my own dear father six years ago, will not mind my referring to it. It was a household consecrated by the love of two devoted sons for a very wonderful father and a very, exceptional mother. I have spoken of the love and devotion of my own family for our parents. It was more than equalled by the devotion of Hallam Tennyson and his brother Lionel — ^now long dead, alas 1 — for their father and mother — something too sacred to be spoken about almost, though I just hint briefly at it in these pages. Lady Tennyson was always very delicate, and I always picture her, as I last saw her, when my mother and I called on her one day, lying on the sofa, where her son was always in close attendance, and where her poet- husband used to come when he wearied of smoking and writing in his study upstairs. It was from their beautiful garden — " a careless-order'd garden " — at Freshwater that one caught the gliro.pse of that " noble down " and the ship " glimmering away to the lonely deep " of which the poet speaks so charmingly in his invitation to his old friend Frederick Denison Maurice : " Come, Maurice, come ; come to the Isle of Wight." And the great poet would come into the drawing-room and talk to his wife's guests. We were all dreadfuHy nervous, of course, and awfully frightened of him, but I think we always felt, as an American lady said to me one day as he left the room : " Well, I may never see him again ; but talk of ' one crowded hour of glorious life,' the last five minutes have been worth all the rest of my life put together 1 " and she turned away to hide the tears that would come. It was very much the same with Henry Irving when he stayed with Tennyson. He would meet princes and ambassadors without giving them a second thought, but even he experienced a nervous tremor when he first encountered the world-renowned poet. I recall him as clearly as a figure etched in sepia against a white horizon — the splendid dome -like head, the noble forehead', the handsome, rough -hewn features and straggling beard and moustache, the organ-like voice, the loose, easy grey suit, if I remember right after all 4o THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD these years. And vividly also do I remember his taking hold of my sister once, before a whole drawing -ro,om full of people, and turning her blushing' face to the full light and saying, " You are a pretty girl, my dear ! "' I recall that incident as though it were yesterday, and yet it is upwards of five-and-thirty years ago ! Another memory I have of him : I came in from my walk one windy November evening and I found Lord Tennyson sitting over the fire with my parents, and he was recalling memories of his old schooldays with my father — or, rather, with my uncles, for he was a little too old to have been actually at school with my father, though they had passed under the same headmaster — and the poet was alluding to the present-day system of kindhess as opposed to the tremendous severity of his and my father's schooldays. " Why," he said, " old W thrashed a boy more unmercifully for a false quantity than a modern head- master to-day would thrash a boy for the worst offence of which schoolboys could be guilty. It was a cruel age, and yet I believe poor old W meant well by us. Don't you remember that poor boy he flogged so dread- fully for not having his lessons done that the child was in bed for six weeks afterwards ? And very often I couldn't hold my knife and fork for days together after one of his canings. What awful trouble he would get into nowadays ! " And then the poet got up and put on his glasses to look more closely at a steel engraving of the very head- master he had been criticizing, which hung over the mantelpiece. A grim old figure enough, clad in cap and gown, a typical University don of ninety years ago or so. And then sitting down, I remember, he took up his cup. " That's a pretty bit of china, Mrs. Blathwayt I " he said to my mother. " Yes," she replied ; " and to me as interesting as it is pretty, because both Sir Walter Scott and Tom Moore have drunk tea out of this set at my dear father's house in Edinburgh. And," she tactfully but very sincerely added — for nothing on earth would have induced my mother to have said anything that was not absolutely BOULOGNE AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 41 sincere — " and now it will be more interesting and valuable than ever." And then the splendid old poet, in high good -humour, donned his flowing cloak and his famous wide -brimmed hat, and bidding us a grufif good-night, he disappeared into the windy night. He was gruff, yes ; but what a heart of gold, what tenderness, what kindly considera- tion beneath all the surface roughness ! To us in the Isle of Wight in those long-dead golden days, to the whole Empire, to all the world, Alfred Tennyson was then, as he remains to-day, the most splendid figure of all that spfendid Victorian era 1 And then there was Tom Hughes, the illustrious author of " Tom Brown's Schooldays," who lived about equi- distant from the Tennysons and ourselves — a. notable figure, a fine upstanding; mjan, with keen, well -cut features and sandy ;whiskers ; and his beautiful and charming sister, Mrs. Nassau Senior, and his brother, Hastings Hughes, and his famQy. " Tom Brown," as every one called him, was a great athlete, and he gave my two little brothers their first swimming lessons in Totland Bay. And I mustn't forget a very marvellous old clergy- man, bom with the nineteenth century, who lived close to the vicarage, land who used to preach for my father, and whO' in his ninetieth year could walk twelve miles a day. He was the Rev. Christopher Bowen, the father of two famous sons ; one, Edward Bowen, the Harrow master, of whom Dr. Butler, when he was the headmaster of the great school on the Hill, used to say, " What would Harrow be without Edward Bowen?" — Edward Bowen who, with Dr. Farmer, the school organist, compiled that famous book of Harrow songs, which includes the deathless " Forty Years On " ; it was Edward Bowen also who brought Dr. Butler, just about the time he became Master of Trinity, to preach for my father at the little church in Totland ; and it was his brother who was so famous in after years as Lord Justice Bowen, a distinguished and pleasing figure whom every one in the parish liked and' admired. I recall, too, the charming and gracious personalities 42 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD of a certain Prince and Princess Ion Ghika, the Rumanian Minister, who used to spend the summer in our parish ; and the Princess, I remember, wanted to take my sister back with them for a long visit to Rumania. There was also Sir Samuel Baker — the dis- coverer, was he not, of the Victoria Nyanza? — and his wife, who were great friends of ours. An interesting coterie, take them for all in all. And then, of course, there was Mr. Wilson Carlile, the head of the Church Army, who used to take my father's duty year after year ; a singularly pleasant, genial man, loved by every one, whose only weakness was, and still is, his quite extraordinary affection for people with titles, but a man who, for all that, has devoted a very splendid and self-sacrificing life to the succour and salvation of the most suffering, the most destitute, and the most absolutely hopeless people that the world has ever known. It was a charming home-life, and the Isle of Wight provided a lovely and romantic background for all that was most delightful in our youthful memories. CHAPTER III THE WHEELS OF CHANCE Somewhere pretty early in the seventies I wandered to the Western World, and, after varied experiences, I found myself in a little country, town in Connecticut — a quaint, queer, typical, bitter -souled, appallingly narrow- minded little New England town, commoner perhaps in the seventies than would be possible to-day : a place where prohibition was rife, but where secret drinking was still rifer ; where the cruelty of the saint towards the sinner, the horrible and unbelievable lack of charity, the incredibly poisonous chatter of gossiping scandal- mongers, and the prurient vision of disappointed and impossibly acid and acrid old maids surpassed anything of which I have ever had experience before or since. The town was religion mad and ruled, or perhaps I had best describe it by calling it " terrorized," by a couple of ministers, very rigid, unbelievably bigoted, though possibly thoroughly sincere men, who, with their deacons, made life very difficult for those who were not of their way of thinking. You will scarcely beheve me when I say that to smoke a cigar in the street, or a pipe, of coiu-se, or any form of tobacco was accounted an absolute sin, and I cannot remember that any native of the town ever dared do so, although I myself, despite my extreme youth, being a Britisher, did not hesitate to smoke whenever I wanted to. In fact, it was a perfect joy to me, silly boy ! to puff by the ministers' houses like a factory chimney in full blast. I had got a little money with me, very little, and I was in the company of two other English- men, one a man about my own age, the son of a 43 44 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD General officer, an Eton boy, a handsome, devil -mlay- care sort of chap, whom everybody loved, and the other a queer, quaint, delightful person, many years older than either of us, whom we always addressed as " George." His other name was Atkins, but we never called him by it, and to the end of our journeying and sojourning together he was always " George," pure and simple. Carew and I followed admiringly in the wake of " George," who also had been at a Public School — Rugby, I believe — before we were either of us born or thought of, and who could and did turn his hand to anything that came along, and a pretty queer job he made of it sometimes. We all three lodged together in a sort of boarding- house, and of course we were the only Englishmen in the town ; indeed, I doubt if in those days there were many Englishmen in Connecticut at all. They were far more scarce then than now, and in consequence we were a mingled source of joy and admiration to the simple-minded natives, and especially to the feminine element, Carew and I particularly because, as they said, we were so like the Englishmen they had read about in books, and they loved to hear us call " pie " " tart," or " larf " instead of " laflf," or any other old thing to which they didn't happen to be accustomed. My eye- glass, too, which I have worn all my life practically, immensely delighted them, and of course the younger portion of the community were much impressed by our absolute ignoring of all the ridiculous conventions and absurd restrictions in which and by which all of them were held in such hopeless bondage. Not that we deliberately or of malice prepense set ourselves in opposition to the ways of the community : we simply didn't know they existed, and by the time we had fully realized the actual state of affairs we had so established our own method of existence that we were left in peace to our own devices. I suppose we were considered too hopelessly abandoned for reformation to be even possible. I don't suppose English people as a rule, save and except perhaps some of the old-fashioned Dissenters, can THE WHEELS OF CHANCE 45 even begin to realize suchl a condition of affairs as was quite common in the small towns and villages in Maine, Connecticut, Vermont, and the New England States generally. Worse than the old Puritanic conditions pre- vailed, worse because whilst they were undistinguished and unilluminated by the noble and all -purifying influ- ence of a deep and searching spirituality, they were characterized by downright cruelty and tyranny : the letter had absolutely triumphed over and murdered the spirit. And there was something pathetic in the manner in which the total abstainers sincerely believed they had crushed the demon of drink — as they termed it — ^the while he raged more furiously in that little town than 1 have ever seen before or since. For, of course, secret drinking prevailed to a perfectly horrible extent. Well, to this town there came one day, to our inex- pressible joy, albeit to the horror and indignation of the unco' guid, a travelling circus and menagerie, and as the prima donna, or the leading lady, or whatever they called her, and three or four of the feminine members of the " fit -up," came and stayed at our boarding-house, we three Englishmen saw a very great deal of that circus — in fact, for the time being, we were established as sort of ex-officio members of it, and a high old time we had of it altogether. To begin with, the prima donna and Carew fell violently in love with each other, and that started things humming. It was a burning summer that year, and those two used to sit out on the veranda — the stoep it was always called — and make love to one another so hot that it scorched the begonias in that little back garden, and surprised even the rattlesnakes in the neighbouring potato- patch. She was an awfully pretty girl and as plucky as they make 'em, and we four were inseparable, and the minister's wife used to toss her head when we passed her window on our way to the circus where " Maimie " had to do her " stunts " every night. And while she was " stunting "—riding bare-backed round and round the tan, or jumping through a hoop, or twisting on a trapeze -bar — I would sit and smoke 46 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD and chat with the clowns and the grooms, the dagoes, the niggers, the Mexican greasers, and the stablemen at the back of the performers' tent. And a queer and amusing and reckless, good -hearted lot they were, too. I fairlj' loved them. There was one old chap there they used to call " Elephant Bill," and of whom they used to relate a very funny yarn. In earlier life, not so many years before, he had been an artist's model, and as he was a very handsome and dignified old chap, with a bald head and a long white beard, he used often to sit for biblical personages. Well, it chanced that a certain artist was painting a New Testament scene, and he engaged old Bill to sit for him as the Apostle St. Matthew. Some years afterwards the artist was walking in the New York Zoological Gardens when he ran up against his old model. " Hullo, Bill I " he cried. " What on earth are you doing here? " "Well, sir," replied Bill, "I aint doin' much. I'mi engaged in these 'ere gardins a-cleanin' out the helephants' stables. A nice sort o' occypation for one o' the twelve apostles, aint it, sir? " he bitterly added. We had a great excitement one day. It was billed all over the town in advance, and for a week previously nothing else was talked of in the place ; even the two ministers were excited about it. For it was announced in all t"he local papers and on every wall in every street that on a certain evening the Rev. Thomas Q. Venning would read the marriage service over a certain couple in the lions' den at the circus. The Rev. Venning was a minister in the next town ; he must have been rather a sport I should think, for I own such a feat takes some doing, and Carew and George wanted to bet me that ho would funk out of it at the last motnent. Well, the night came, and so did the Rev. Venning and the bride and bridegroom. The two men looked a little pale about the gills, and I offered to stand the pajson a drink at the nearest chemist's, where I knew I could get varied " poisons " under the name and in the aspect of bottles of medicine, However, THE WHEELS OF CHANCE 47 lie wasn't taking any, and the girl laughed at the bare idea of such Dutch courage. She didn't mind a bit. Of coiurse there was an enormous crowd, and I began to be anxious less there should be a scene and the animals be frightened. At eight to the minute the band started in with the wedding march and the lions' trainer and the keeper stepped into the den — a very big one — with their gigantic rhinoceros -hide whips, and then the bridal pair and the parson stepped in behind him, the band playing for all it was worth. The parson, looking ver>' white, began a very abbre\-iated form of the marriage service, and he hurried along at a rate which would have allowed him to give any man as far as " Pontius Pilate " in the Creed and then romp in ahead of him, but he couldn't get any speed on the bride. She actually dela3'ed taking off her glove till the parson bade the groom put the ring on her finger. She didn't even glance at the lions, who were obviously getting restive, the more especially that the wretched bridegroom was one of the plumpest and most appetizing -looking men — from a leonine point of view — ^that one could possibly imagine. At last, at long last, infinitely to the relief of every one in that heated and excited audience, the minister came to the final Amien and the bridal procession filed out again, but not before the irritated and long-suffering lioness had made a grab at and torn clean away from her the floating ribbon the little bride wore roimd her waist. And do you know, that plucky little woman wanted to go and get it back from the outraged animal ! And there was no swagger or pretence about it either : she simply didn't know what the word " fear " meant. The bridegroom, on the contrary, fairly collapsed, and the minister confessed to nie that he wotddn't do it again for all the dollars in the United States. And then one day it was announced that Miss Mamie Collins — that was Carew's mash ! — who, according to the time-honoured announcements, " had appeared before all the crowiied heads in Eiyrope/' would ascend in a 48 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD balloon " ten thousand feet into the blue empyrean "—that was how the bills phrased it — ^and would then descend to earth again in a parachute. And it was our turn to be anxious, and a pretty sickly time of it we all had. For, of course, it was all new to us, and the thought of that dear little woman jumping down ten thousand feet was too horrible and ghastly for words, and we did all we could to dissuade her from so mad a project, as we considered it, but all to no purpose. She didn't worry about it one little bit, not she ; she was as plucky as the bride, and pluckier, for she knew her risks, which the other hadn't done. It was then, I think, that I realized, what 1 have often experi- enced since, how frequently women are far braver than men. It was an anxious week, as I have said ; but it came to an end at last, and the morning of the day dawn^ when Maimie was to do the " Elijah stunt," as she irreverently termed it, and go up to heaven in a balloon instead of a chariot of fire. A lovely day it was as she and I walked down the street and out of the town and on to the great wide -stretching field whereon the circus tents were pitched and from which the balloon was to ascend. Things were all ready for her and the meadow was crowded with a very excited throng, and Maimie went into her dressing -tent to get into her tights — those same tights, by the by, constituted a terrible rock of offence in the eyes of the ministers' and deacons' wives, though, as a matter of fact, they were nothing very out of the way. Well, out she came, looking very jolly, for she had a charming figure, which the tig'hts displayed to its very fullest advantage, and the crimson light which was cast by her Japanese simshade — a great rarity in those days, and especially so in a New England village — was immensely becoming to her lovely face, and into the basket she stepped, kissing her hand tp us three standing anxiously by as she did so, and then the word was given to " let go," and in a minute, so it appeared to me, she was far abpve our heads, It was THE WHEELS OF CHANCE 49 a dead still day, and, to judge from the very stationary appearance of the balloon, there were no u{^er currents of air at all. We had hired a sort of buggy, and we started out in the direction in which it wotild appear likely that she wotild descend, and we got as far away from the crowd as we possibly could, keeping our eyes fixed all the time upon the balloon. Up and up it soared, and down and down our hearts sank. I had a very powerful glass with me, so I could keep a pretty good eye on all that was occurring in that terrific blue so awfully far away. At last I discerned a kind of movement. 1 made out a figure stepping over the side of the basket, sliding down a rope, it appeared to me, and then there wa&a kind of upward spring of the balloon and a solitary speck falling, falling in that marvellous blue space. " By God ! she's coming down ! " 1 ejacu- lated, and then it appeared to me something opened out and expanded and the downward rush became a gentle inclining to the earth. We all three breathed more freely, and there came across those sunny meadows and borne to us from afar upon the scented summer breeze the faint far-off cheering of a vast multitude. Down and down and down towards the blessed earth that brave, pathetic little figure came dropping through the summer day, and I drove like Jehu for the spot whereon 1 quickly realized she would fall, and at last I saw her touch the ground and then she appeared to collapse. I pulled up just outside a gate, tied the horse up, and then we vaulted the gate and flew over the lush grass to where we could see her stretched flat upon her back, oiu" hearts in our mouths the while. As we got up to her she raised a smiling face to Carew. " Say, Jack, have you got a match? " " Oh, hang the match ! " said Jack. " Are you all right? That's aU I'm worrying about." " Why, of course, I am, you dear old silly ; never better ! " And indeed I don't believe she ever was. But we all swore we wouldn't go through that hoiu- again for all the diamonds in Golconda. I don't think any of 4 so THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD us have ever 'forgotten it, although I don't think 1 have ever spoken of it to any one ; but to this day Jack tells me he sees her in his dreams, dropping, dropping, dropping through the sunlit air, and he wakes to find the cold sweat breaking out upon his forehead. It was an immensely plucky thing to do, although she always used to declare it was "as easy as old boots." I shall never forget that circus and that menagerie. Even now I can snifif the pungent tan and sawdust and the still more pungent smell of the lions, all delight- fully mixed up together with the smell of that powerful " twist " tobacco with which they llllcd their black cutties and meerschaums. The life was always full of subdued excitement, for it was a careless kind of menagerie altogether, some said too careless — for they were always " mislaying," as they used to term it euphoniously, one of their charges — an elephant, m;iybe, or a python, or a tiger, or a crocodile ; they weren't particular one way or the other. One day, just after brcakfaist, I peeped in at the mess- room door. There was a full-grown tigier licking the jam and bacon off the plates. " Oh^ I beg your pardon I " I ejaculated as I hastily sjibt the door. A moment after 1 met Jack, the tiger's keeper. " I can't find that tiger nowhere," he said to me. " I guess I've mislaid the ornary old critter." " You have," I icily replied, for I was a good deal annoyed with the danger I had so narrowly escaped. " You'll find him in the messroom licking the plates." " Thank you, mate," he said as he lazed away in the direction of his missing friend, huniitaing to himself — " Jack Sprat could eat no fat, His wife could eat no loan, And 80 between them both They licked the platter clean." An hour after I overheard the proprietor asking his little son if he had washed iup the breakfast dishes. " Hadn't no need to. Pop ; the tiger licked 'em like he knew they wanted cleanin' " THE WHEELS, OF CHANCE $1 I didn't go to lunch that day ! Another day I had to drop myself down ofif the balustrade to give place to the python, which was coiling itself up the stairs, and Carew jolly near sat down on the crocodile, which was hidden away in the deep grass near the river. I asked the proprietor once why he mixed up menageries and circus dancers in the way he did. " Well, young feller," he said, " it's like this. Pretty often round about these ornary old New England towns the people are so religious they wouldn't go to a circus noways. But a camel or an elephant or a serpent — well, you'll find them all in the Bible. Behemoth, he's a elephant, and the camel goin' through a needle's eye, and, of course, the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Well, I always bring in them scriptooral references, and they know what they're up against, and they think tights ain't so wicked 'longside of an elephant or a camel." I have referred to the " carelessness " of the men in dealing with their animals, though I fancy much of that carelessness was assumed, and beneath lay intimjate knowledge of the ways and wiles of their charges, and they weren't really taking ail the risks they appeared to be taking, aoid their carelessness was nothing compared with the instances of which Carl Hagenbeck used to tell me some years ago. It always amused me, though, to see the serpent -keeper dash' down three or four pounds of python or cobra upon a marble slab as a grocer might dash down a slab of butter. " Pound of cobra, madam ? Yes, madam, and the next article ? " Well, after a while w« parted company with the circus, and Carew and Maimie bade one ianother a wild and despairing farewell. Carew, of course, is still going strong. Indeed, I believe he's a Colonel at the Front, and I read this chapter over to George only the other day. Maimie I have never even heard of since we all separated, and I should think the dear old circus pro- prietor has long since departed this life, for he wasn't very young then; he must have been at least sixty. 52 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD He told me one incident that immensely amused me. I related it thirty years ago in a London paper, but 1 daresay it's forgotten by now. He had a blue-faced baboon once which drew the whole countryside to the menagerie. One morning early he was sitting outside the tent when a man and his wife — a regular Farmer Hayseed — ^approached, followed by twenty young people. " Say, mister," said the old chap, " we want to see your baboon, so I've brought my family along ; only I want to do a deal for the lot." "All them your children?" said the boss. "One father and one mother?" " All mine and all hearn," replied Farmer Hayseed, with a backward gesture towards his wife. The boss gasped. " Say," he said, " you all just stop right here, and I'll bring that old baboon out to see you. He ain't had much excitement lately, but I guess you and your family will cheer him up and give him something to think about winter nights." George and Carew and I drifted on, always travelling " very light." As a matter of fact we had no choice in the matter. Heavens I we were hard up, but always in the best of spirits and generally in fits of laughter, even when we were so hungry that, as George put it, we could easily have eaten a lion, with a whole regiment of cavalry inside him, jackboots and all. One day we arrived in a village, and as we were very nearly at the end of our tether George declared we must get some " chores " to do. So, having made a few inquiries and got certain information, we started off for a kind of farmer and carpenter and wheelwright and odd-job sort of man we heard of, and when we got there George marched into a lumber-yard as bold as brass, Carew and I following close upon his rear, and a man came up and George said to him — " Are you the boss? " " Wal, I guess I fit in thar," was the reply. " Well, look here, boss," said George, -' do you want any help ? " THE WHEELS OF CHANCE 53 " Yaas, I reckon I du. Kin you make wheels, you feUers?" " \Mieels ! " replied George. " Wheels ! ^^'hy, I've been at the job all my life." I shook my head. Carew stepped manfully forward. " Wal, I'll give you fifteen doUaxs a week each to start with and a room and board. Is it a deal? Can you do chores about the house, young feller? " he said to me. I " guessed " I could, and he, saying he'd tell his " darter " to find me some work, tiu^ed into the house, whilst Carew and I tackled George on the extraordinary position in which he had placed himself. " You can't make wheels, you old hxunbug," said Carew, *' can you ? " " Never made a wheel in my life, not even a watch- wheel," replied George ; " but I'm going to have a jolly good try right here and now, and so are you, Carew, my boy." They both stripped for the fray, and having each got hold of an adze, they started in upon some planks of wood that were lying in thick profusion about the yard. And just at that moment the boss retiu-ned. " Wal, thar j-ou are, boys ; thar's the wood and the toolhouse is up yonder, so get a push on you ; and you come with me," he added, turning to where I stood rather disconsolately, and, following him into the house, I left George and Carew and started on my own adventurous career. The " darter " turned out to be a pretty little thing enough, and as we were about the same age and full of life and I was the first Britisher she had ever seen, much 1^ talked to — and Lord f as old Pepy^ says, how she " lafi^ed " when I did start in to speak — we were ver\' sooa regular old friends. She pinned a big apron round me, and screamed when a few minutes afterwards I retvu^ed with a bucket of water from the weU and tumbled over that infernal apron and spiEed all the water over the kitchen floor. I was sufficiraitly awkward and unhandy, but I contrived to show her, or to tell her, how to make an omelette, of which up to that moment she had never even heard. 54 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD About two hours later the boss came in, and he said to me: "You been helpin' my little gal, eh? That's right. Well, come along, and we'll see how them other chaps are gittin' along and bring 'em back to have some supper." Though I think if I remember right he called it " lunch," which they often do in country districts in America. Well, when we reached those two fellows they had evidently been working like mad, to judge by the chips that lay about, and there were some nicely " dressed " planks of wood all ready to be worked up into wheels ; the boss seemed thoroughly satisfied, ajid he said : " Well, boys, come along and we'll have supper and then a smoke. I guess you are ready for a rest." The evening passed all right. George sang "Tom Bowling," and the boss said " it was a damned dismal sort of ditty, anyway " ; and we all went to bed and slept like tops. In the morning I turned out early and lit the kitchen fire and put the kettle on, and wished Glynne Turquand and the other Guardsmen could have seen me — how they'd have laughed ! And then George and Carew went out to the wheelyard and I went and did my " chores." Look at my portrait now and imagine me sweeping the room and making the beds, etc., though 1 must confess I was always a dab at blacking boots, which, of course, was just the one thing they never dreamed of doing there, right out in the wilds. About eleven o'clock I knocked off, and, nodding to the " darter," I went out into the yard and joined the others, George shouted out to me as I came up' — " We've started wheelmaking in earnest now I What do yoti think of that for a wheel?" And he held up an absolutely incomprehensible affair in wood, held together by a few nails. " Good heavens 1 *' I said. " Why, that's not a wheel ; it's a problem in Euclid I " and I laughed till I was feeble with laughing. And then up came the boss him- self for the first time that morning. He looked at George's wheel, and then he looked at George and George looked at him. " What's that? " said the bo?s, THE WHEELS OF CHANCE 55 " It's a wheel," said George as bold as brass. " A wheel ! " screamed our employer. " Why, darn it all, man, it's an eight -day clock ! That thing will never be roimd, and it'H never go roimd either, not on your life ! " "These are wheels that my friend and 1 are making," replied George with all the gravity and dignity that he could summon to his aid ; " but they're not the kind of wheels that you are accustomed to in this country. It's a wheel they use for the roads in Russia." " But doggone it all, man," said the boss, " we're in Connecticut, not in Russia ! " " It's an octagonal wheel," obstinately continued George, " which you will find admirably suited for yoiu" corduroy roads here. A wheel like that," he continued with ill-concealed pride in his handiwork, " wiU last you a lifetime, and then you can hand it down to posterity as an heirloom. You 11 find the farmers hereabouts for hundreds of miles will make a run on your yard for these wheels." The boss, who was absolutely one of the best, burst into a roar of laughter. " Well," he said, " you'll have to make a run out of the yard ; for a week of you and your friend would aboirt ruin me." And as he spoke he thrust a fifteen- dollar bill into George's hand, another into Carew's, and a ten -dollar bill into my hand. " I siq)pose youll want to go with them? " he said to me. George protested. '- Look here, boss," he said, " we can't take this money if you are not satisfied. You must take it back, and we'll try our luck elsewhere." " Not a bit of it," replied the boss. " You chaps have made me laff as I never hoped to laflf again. Any omary old cuss can make wheels, but, dam it all, it takes a man to make that ! " And, pointing feebly at George's "problem in Euclid," or " eight -day clock," as he called it, he sat down upon a tree -trunk and laughed till he was too weak and exhausted to laugh any more. And then we made for the deepot and once more 56 THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD were on the road, and the wheels of chance lay far in our rear. I daresay they are in a dime museum now. I have seen freaks I have laughed at less than I laughed at George's corduroy wheels. Here I end my very early days. Henceforward my records deal with the rather strenuous work and career of manhood. But I am glad I went through the experi- ences I then went through. They did me good ; they enabled me to realize something of what life really meant, even our little adventures in the circus. They help one to see life and to see it straight and see it whole, and I made none the worse an East End curate that I had seen a little bit of real life and of life jn the rough and done a few " chores " in a New England farmhouse — for I had more than one experience of that kind when out in America in the seventies. And oh, by the by, I wouldn't have lost the experience of that boarding-house where I met Maimie for anything on this wide earth ! I think the lady who kept it was the most absolutely amusing, the most shiftless, the most feckless, and the most good-natured person I ever met in my life — ^and always mislaying everything. She had a husband, a horrid little man whom we all detested, a sneaky little fellow, always prying about and poking his nose into household affairs, a regular " kitchen colonel," as they call them in America. But she was a rare good sort, with a heart of gold and a head like a sieve. I remember one night we had pork and beans for supper, and we were to have had potatoes, too, but when the moment arrived for them they could nowhere be found. " Why, I declar' to goodness I put thlem taters all out ready in the dish agin you all come in to supper ! " cried the puzzled and distressed landlady. " Perhaps the cat has eaten them," suggested Carew. " Eaten the potatoes. Jack ! " cried Maimie. " Why, that cat's got all she can do, laffin' at you and Ray talkin', ever to find time to eat potatoes I No, we've got to do without any potatoes to-night, I guess," THE WHEELS; OF CHANCE 57 After that we went into the parlour, as they always called it, and Maimie made to sit down on the sofa. Suddenly she gave a frightful screech. " For the land's sake ! " she screamed, " I'm sittin' down on a rattler's nest, sure ! " I flew to her side and pulled her up. Hanged if she hadn't gone and sat plump down on the potatoes, which by some mischance the landlady had banged down on the sofa and then clean forgotten what she had done with them ! Carew and Maimie and I laughed for one solid hour over that episode, and indeed I once nearly laughed at it in the middle of the Litany one day, years and years afterwards, in a stately West End church here in London ! Well, as I say, these little experiences are good for one ; they are very innocent really, and they keep you from crystallizing into a prig, anyway, which many young Englishmen are only too apt to do in the very early days of their career. Maimie was a girl in a thousand, though I suppose they would look askance at her in a deanery. She had a heart of gold and such courage as I never saw in mortal man or woman in my life ; and if we three young men did run a little wild — well, the young man who never makes a mistake very rarely makes anything else, except, perhaps, an infernal ass of himself, and it all helps to make you more human and more sympathetic and more understanding. At all events, I not only don't regret my early exj>eriences, but I believe they did me far more good than harm, and I look back upon that period of my life as upon the golden days of youth. CHAPTER IV A GLIMPSE INTO A CURATES LIFE AND MIND " Now, Mr. Blathwayt," said the Rev. Canon Henderson, a handsome, white-haired', thoroughbred little man of the world, and extremely popular with the students of the Dunchester Theological College, of which he was the Principal, and whithter I was sent jn the middle seventies, for the parental funds did not then allow of University fees, and where I remained for two whole years reading for the Church — " now, Mr. Blathwayt, just read this passage out of ^schylus, will you, and let me see what you make of it. Read the Greek first and then translate it." I must remark, in parenthesis, that I had gone up to be examined for entry into the college. By all that was fortunate the Canon had struck upon one of my father's favourite pieces, the opening lines of " Prometheus Bound " — at all events, the famous lines where Prometheus bewails his fate — w oToc aldrip koi rai^virrfjoot rri'oat iroTafxiLv ra vr^yai Trovr(u)v te KV/naTwv avfipiBfjiov yi\a