“May 15.—Dined with Lord and Lady Aberdeen—a very large party, seventy-four pots of flowers upon the table. The dinner was very fine, but rather uninteresting—the after-dinner better.
“May 16.—I received the sad news that poor Sir Alexander Taylor was on his death-bed in Lady Dashwood’s house at Hampstead, and went to him. He knew me and was pleased to see me, but immediately relapsed into unconsciousness. It was sad to stand by the utter wreck of one whom I had known so well.”
“May 17.—News of poor Sir Alexander’s death. Even at such a solemn time one could not help smiling at his characteristic last words—‘Present my duty to the Princess Amalie’ (of Schleswig-Holstein).[304]
“At luncheon at Lady Florentia Hughes’s I met George Russell, who told me a story which Lord and Lady Portsmouth had just brought back from Devonshire.
“‘On the railway which runs from Exeter to Barnstaple is a small station called Lapford. A farmer who lives in a farmhouse near that station awoke his wife one night, saying that he had had a very vivid dream which troubled him—that a very valuable cow of his had fallen into a pit and could not get out again. The wife laughed, and he went to sleep and dreamt the same thing. Then he wanted to go and look after the cow. But the wife urged the piercing cold of the winter night, and he went to sleep instead, and dreamt the same thing a third time. Then he insisted upon getting up, and, resisting his wife’s entreaties, he went out to look after the cow. It was with a sense of bathos that he found the cow quite well and grazing quietly, and he was thinking how his wife would laugh at him when he got home, and wondering what he should say to her, when he was aware of a light in the next field. Crawling very quietly to the hedge, he saw, through the leafless branches of the hawthorns, a man with a lanthorn and a spade, apparently digging a pit. As he was watching, he stumbled in the ditch and the branches crackled. The man, hearing a noise, started, threw down the spade, and ran off with the lanthorn.
“‘The farmer then made his way round into the next field and came up to the place where the man had been digging. It was a long narrow pit like an open grave. At first he could make nothing of it, then by the side of the pit he found a large open knife. He took that and the spade, and began to set out homewards, but, with an indescribable shrinking from the more desolate feeling of the fields, he went round by the lane. He had not gone far before he heard footsteps coming towards him. It was two o’clock in the morning, and his nerves being quite unstrung, he shrank from meeting whoever it was, and climbed up into the hedge to conceal himself. To his astonishment, he saw pass below him in the moonlit road one of the maids of his own farmhouse. He allowed her to pass, and then sprang out and seized her. She was most dreadfully frightened. He demanded to know what she was there for. She tried to make some excuse. “Oh,” he said, “there can be no possible excuse; I insist upon knowing the truth.” She then said, “You know I was engaged to be married, and that I had a dreadful quarrel with the man I was engaged to, and it was broken off. Well, yesterday he let me know that if I would meet him in the middle of the night, he had got something to show me which would make up for all the past.”—“Would you like to know what he had to show you? It was your grave he had to show you,” said the farmer, and he led her to the edge of the pit and showed it to her.
“‘The farmer’s dream had saved the woman’s life.’”
“May 19.—The Prince (of Sweden and Norway) has arrived with his suite at Claridge’s. He received me most cordially and affectionately. We made many plans for sight-seeing and people-seeing, but in England I have no responsibility; Count Piper, the Swedish Minister, has it all.
“I dined at charming Lady Wynford’s, sitting near Lord Delamere, who was very full of a definition he had heard of the word ‘deputation.’ ‘A noun of multitude, which signifies many, but not much.’ It was attributed to Gladstone, who said, ‘I only wish I had made it.’ Lord Eustace Cecil produced a definition of ‘Independent Member’ as ‘a Member on whom nobody can depend.’