Invermark. A place renowned for many kinds of sport, salmon fishing included. It belonged, when I knew it, to the late Lord Dalhousie, who generally let it and confined himself to Brechin Castle, with excursions to Panmure House. Invermark was a lodge and nothing more; just room for half a dozen guests and their guns and servants. Lord Dudley and the late Lord Hindlip had it together one year. Lord Hindlip was the head of the great brewery firm of Allsopp & Co. He announced to us one night at dinner that he must go to London next morning on business. He went, returning two days later. He had spent twelve hours in London. Somebody said "I hope your business turned out all right." Lord Hindlip answered: "I don't know about all right. I bought £750,000 ($3,750,000) worth of hops a price which makes it impossible there should be any profit in the next twelve months' brewing." Nobody asked but everybody looked another question: "Then why buy?" Lord Hindlip continued his sentence as if he had not noticed our curiosity. "But if I had not bought yesterday there would have been no brewing of beer at all for the next twelve months, nor perhaps ever."
This was one of the houses—perhaps only those belonging to the great brewers—where beer was served with the cheese instead of port. But not the kind of beer known to the ordinary mortal. Beer specially brewed, long kept, tenderly cared for, and somehow transformed into a transcendental fluid, transparent, golden in colour, nectar to the taste, strangely mild on the palate, but swiftly finding its way to the brain if you were ensnared into drinking a tumblerful. There was nothing to warn you unless your host warned you, which he generally did not. He perhaps rather pressed it upon you as they do the Audit ale at Trinity College, Cambridge, with a hospitality not free from guile. That I knew through the late Mr. Justice Denham, who was my host, and when I resisted he told me how Lord Chancellor Campbell had praised the mildness of the ale, and had a second drink, and then a third; and upon emerging from the buttery into the fresh air found himself embarrassed; he, the hardest head at the Bar of his time. A story which I hand on as a warning to the next comer.
CHAPTER XXXVII
FAMOUS ENGLISHMEN NOT IN POLITICS
I
There are, perhaps, a few names of to-day which it is possible to mention without becoming involved in the politics of to-day. The English, it is true, draw a broader line between what is purely political and what is personal than we do. They can give and take hard knocks, whether in Parliament or on the platform or even in the Press, without animosity or resentment. But since in America it seems to be supposed that any reference to these encounters may have its danger side I avoid them for the present. I turn away from the Revolutionary present, of which one's stock of Memories increases day by day, to the more peaceful past or to a more peaceful world in the present; a world unravaged by political passions. True, the past was not always a peaceful past while it lasted. We do not always remember how fierce were the storms which have subsided. But where Death has made a solitude we call it peace.
In two, at least, of the great contests waged these periods of peace I had a share, which I must mention again for the sake of another story I have to tell. One was the conflict about Irish Home Rule which became critical and revolutionary in 1881 and 1886; when I was allowed to state my own views, unpopular as they were in America, in The Tribune week by week or day by day; a policy of generous and far-sighted courage on the part of that journal; honourable to its editor and I hope in the long run not injurious to the paper.
The second was in 1895 and 1896, in The Times of London. When President Cleveland flung his message of war upon the floor of the House at Washington in December, 1895, I necessarily had much to say about it in The Times. There again I was given a free hand. It is sometimes said that the correspondents of this journal frame their news dispatches in accordance with orders issued to them from the home office. I can only say, if indeed I may say so much without violating obligations of secrecy, that during a service which lasted ten years I never knew of or heard of any such orders.
Coming to England in the summer of 1896 on a holiday, I had some slight illness and asked a friend whom I should consult. My own doctor was by that time attending patients, I suppose, in another and better world. My friend said he had lately seen fourteen physicians about his son and each of the fourteen had given a different name to his son's disease.