Volume 6 — XXX IN MANY PLACES (continued 3)

“Two days later I went to Edwardstone, a delightful old place near Sudbury, one of the many of which Bishop Hare’s wife was the heiress, and where numbers of her Alston ancestors are buried; and then I was two days at the familiar Campsea Ashe, where, as its beloved owner says, ‘If you do not know how to enjoy yourself, you must be made to.’ Mr. Astor was there, and told me that the origin of the American expression ‘a chestnut’ lay in the rivalries of the theatres in Chestnut Street and Walnut Street in New York. An expected star who came out in the Walnut Street Theatre could only do things which had already appeared in Chestnut Street, and when the young men saw them they said, ‘That’s a chestnut,’ and it passed into a proverb.

“Mr. Astor was very funny about a man who was always late for everything, and who one day, when he was expecting a party to stay with him, rushed home after all his guests had arrived. On the stairs he met a man, with whom, to make up for lost time, he shook hands most warmly, saying, ‘Oh, my dear fellow, I’m so glad to see you; do make yourself quite at home and enjoy yourself.’ It was a burglar, very much surprised at his cordial reception, for he was carrying off all the valuables. He also said—

“‘You know Dr. N. and his wonderful tales. I heard him tell of going to shoot chamois. He had sighted one a long way off and fired. He said the chamois never moved, but put up one foot and scratched its ear. He fired again, and it put up the other foot and scratched the other ear. Then he fired again and killed it. When he came up to it, he found that each of the first shots had touched an ear. The chamois had only thought, “Oh, these damned fleas!”

“‘Then Dr. N. told of how he went after bears. A grisly came and he shot him: then another grisly came and he shot him: then a third grisly came.... “If you say you shot him” said a man present, “I’ll throw this bottle at your head.” “Well, the third grisly escaped,” calmly said Dr. N.’

“The last two days of my absence I spent with the Grant Duffs at Lexden Manor, where Sir Mountstuart was most agreeable and anecdotive, and whence Lady Grant Duff drove me to see the old gateway of Layer Marney, beautiful in its great decay.”

“London, Nov. 29.—Luncheon with the C.’s, who had dined last night with the Wilberforces. Canon Wilberforce told them of a missionary establishment in Africa, a most admirable mission, which had been most effective, had converted the whole neighbourhood, built church and schools, and done no end of good.

“Then, in some crisis or other, the mission was swept away and the place was long left desolate.

“After many years the missionaries returned, expecting to find everything destroyed. But, to their astonishment, they found the church-bell going and the buildings in perfect repair, all looking as before—only there was a difference. They could not make out what it was.

“So they went to the chief and asked him about it. ‘Well, yes,’ he said, ‘there is one little difference. You used to tell us that God was love and always watching over us for good, while the devil was always seeking to destroy us; so we felt it was the devil we had better propitiate, and it is the devil we have worshipped ever since you left, and—it has most completely answered.’”

“Dec. 22, 1899.—I am just at the end of a long retreat in a sort of private hospital, where I have been for the sake of the ‘Nauheim cure’ for an affection of the heart, from which I have now suffered for more than a year, and which was greatly increased by the anxieties and sorrows of last August. I am better since my ‘cure,’ but am seldom quite well now, and, as I read in a novel, ‘my dinner is always either a satisfying fact or a poignant memory,’ and generally the latter. The South African war news is casting a shadow over the closing year, and the death of Lady Salisbury has been a real sorrow—an ever-kind friend since my early boyhood. I went to the memorial service for her in the Chapel-Royal—a beautiful service, but a very sad one to many.”

To Mrs. and Miss Agnes Thornycroft (after a happy visit to them at Torquay).

“Liskeard, May 7, 1900.—I will begin a history to my two kindest of hostesses from this dreary wind-stricken little town, which is as ugly as it can be, but with a large, clean, old-fashioned posting-inn. I got a little victoria to take me the 2½ miles to St. Cleer’s Well in the uplands, in a moorland village, approached by primrosy, stitchworty lanes. The well is a glorious subject for sketching, old grey stones tinged with golden lichen, a canopy of open Norman arches, and background of purple hill. It was so bitterly, snowily cold that I feared, as I sate down on my camp-stool, that sciatica would never allow me to rise from it; but Providence sent me a whole schoolful of children, boys and girls, about sixty of them, who pressed close round through the whole performance, so I just wore them like an eider-down, and was rather hot than otherwise. Returning, the evening was still so young that I took the carriage on to St Keyne’s Well, on the other side of Liskeard, but it was scarcely worth the visit.”

“Helston, May 8, 6 P.M.—No farther than this, for when I arrived here at midday, I found there was no chance of getting on to the Lizard; the whole town was in too great a turmoil to attend to any individual, for it was Furry Day, a local floral festa from very early times, and all the gentlemen and ladies of the neighbourhood (the real ones!) were dancing in couples, with bands playing through the streets, under garlanded arches and flags flying from every window. This sounds lovely, but really was not—only curious, though it gave infinite satisfaction to the thousands of spectators, who on this day bring great wealth to the town. But oh! the noise and discomfort for an unwilling spectator—the organs, and peep-shows, and wild-beast shows, and ‘Boer and Briton’ shows, and horsemanship-ladies careering through the streets after the dancing was over. If any one wishes to know what the Inferno is like and the worst din the human mind can imagine, they should spend a ‘Furry Day;’ only, to be sure, at Helston all the people are quite good, which would probably make a very considerable difference!”

“Helston, May 10.—Yesterday I breakfasted in the coffee-room with an old gentleman who was exceedingly angry with me because I did not think Sterne’s ‘Sentimental Journey’ should be one of the twelve novels to be saved if all the rest in the world were swept away—‘only the most dense ignorance of literature’ could make me confess such a thing!

“It was a drive of ten miles in a grand and lonely landau through a country brilliant with gorse and blackthorn. Beneath a great plantation on the right was the Loe Pool, only separated by a strip of silver sand from the sea, and described in Tennyson’s ‘Morte d’Arthur.’ Beyond a wooded hollow with rocks and fir trees the road enters upon the high-lying plain of the Lizard, wind-stricken, storm-swept, without a tree, the houses of ugly Lizard-town rising black against a pellucid sky on the horizon. A scrambling walk down a rugged lane, and then a pathlet marked by white stones above tremendous precipices brought me to Kynance Cove—a little disappointing, for it was high water when it ought to have been low, and a grey colourless day when it ought to have been brilliant. However, my drawing ‘answered,’ as Aunt Kitty would have said, and in two hours, as it began to mizzle, I was ready to return.”

“Tintagel, May 10.—The ‘girling’ of the sea in the old ballad of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ just expresses what one hears here. This ‘Wharncliffe Arms’ is an ideal inn, and very striking is the little glen, now so primrosy, with the black ruined castle, the cries of the seabirds—

“Royal Hotel, Bideford, May 15.—This house has beautiful old rooms built by John Davy, the first tobacco merchant, with splendid Italian ceilings: the little Revenge was built in a shipping yard just before the house, and in a narrow street on the other side the river is a public-house which is the house of Sir Richard Grenville. I thought the path above the precipice at Lynton the most beautiful sea-walk I ever saw. In places it is a sheer wall of rock rising from the waves—

“Middlewick, Corsham, May 18.—The kind Clutterbucks, with whom I am staying, took me to Castlecombe yesterday, the home of the Scroopes for five hundred years, and quite one of the most enchanting places in England, in its green glen, its clear rushing river, its exquisite church tower and old market-cross. I saw it last at nine years old, and was enchanted to find its loveliness all and more than I remembered. To-day we went to luncheon at Harnish, and I visited once more the little rectory where I was at school for three and a half most miserable years. How different a little boy’s path is now! We saw Corsham Court afterwards, with Cronje’s flag floating over its staircase.”

“Holmhurst, May 23.—I found a very large party on Saturday at hospitable Mr. Astor’s, and Cliveden in great beauty, entrancing carpets of bluebells under the trees. A telegram from the Queen of Sweden took me to Roehampton on Monday. It was twenty-two years since I had seen the King, and I thought him even handsomer and more royal-looking than of old. The Queen is not less fragile, and as full of good thoughts and words as ever. I had luncheon with the royal pair and their household, and a long talk with the Queen afterwards, who told me much of my especial Prince, now Regent in his father’s absence.”