It was on a warm evening in a tea-garden that he had talked about his coming visit to London. I recollect his enthusing over the phrase
"Beneath the rule of men supremely great
The pen is mightier than the sword."
A great motto for a great country, he then said it was. He professed an anxiety to see or meet some of the great English writers, our literati, as he called them. He liked the honesty of Englishmen in business, and wanted to see them at work. He had helped to show me something of the life of the East—that part of the life most difficult to see, the life of the home—and in return I promised to show him something of the life of the West, how and where people work and play, and pray—when they do so.
"Show me the house of one of your literati if we pass one," he said. "Is that one, there?" pointing to a gorgeous public-house, as we passed a street corner.
I saw the probable toppling of an ideal. We passed a couple of quick-driving vans with a green placard of an evening paper, and I explained to him what a reading public we were, and how many editions of the papers were quickly distributed during the afternoon, how the appetite for them had grown, like the craving for cheap cigarettes, as a relief from being obliged to inhale pure literary air. The newspaper habit and the cigarette habit are about on a par after all.
Hospital Train Leaving Ladysmith For Pietermaritzburg.
We passed a church with closed doors, and he seemed surprised. I explained to him that the churches were open on Sunday, on which day the more numerous temples of Bacchus were closed for a while.
We reached the Strand, where he was greatly interested in a line of 'buses. "Have you no street cars like in New York?" I submitted that these were kept on chiefly in order to have a supply of artillery horses in times of war.