And then have you ever heard of the National Trust for the Preservation of Places of Historic Interest and Natural Beauty? This was founded by the late Octavia Hill with the purpose of acquiring for the nation, for ever, beauty spots and open spaces and old comely buildings. Isn’t that a good and humane idea? To preserve a piece of grass land, with all its trees intact, in the midst of a new building estate! All kinds of parks and commons and hill-tops are now inviolate through the activities of this Society. Would you like your money to strengthen their hands? No one with money to spare who followed Octavia Hill could go wrong.
That is enough for the present; but I will supply further hints.
You want stories, you say. Here is one which was told yesterday, at Mrs. Beldham’s, by a very attractive and humorous woman. We had been talking of jewels; apropos, I think, of Lady Crowborough’s pearl necklace which she took off and allowed me to hold. Nothing more exquisite than the temperature and texture of them could I imagine; only about twenty-five thousand pounds’ worth, that’s all. I wonder that the psychic quality of jewels has not appealed more to novelists, for there can be no doubt that they are curiously sympathetic. Pearls in particular, which grow the finer the more constantly and intimately they are worn by congenial wearers, but which languish and decline in lustre as their wearer loses health, and worn on some necks refuse to glow and shine at all. I can see a Hawthorney kind of story in which the living pearls of a dead mistress play a subtle part.
Anyway, we were talking about precious stones, and this Mrs. Dee told us her hard case. For she is the owner of some of the most beautiful emeralds that exist in this country: the owner, but she cannot get at them. They belonged, she said, to her Aunt Emily, and it was always understood that upon the death of that estimable and ageing lady they were to descend to her. It was, indeed, in the will. And so they would have done, had not the too officious layers-out neglected to remove them from the old lady’s neck.
“Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’,” said Mrs. Dee, “is a melancholy poem, but its sadness is as nothing compared with mine, when I sit beside Aunt Emily’s grave in the Finchley Road cemetery and think of all my jewels growing dim only six feet or so below me.”
R. H.
P.S.—Behold to-day’s poem:—
Men say they know many things;
But lo! they have taken wings,
The arts and sciences,