“Few centenarians can ever have contributed a more exhilarating addition to an evening’s excitement.
“Dr. Hooper, late Master of Trinity and ex-Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, expressed his gratification that his alma mater was indissolubly associated with the great undertaking which they were once more met to celebrate in convivial conclave. Cambridge was famous for its ‘Backs,’ and it had put its back into the Encyclopædia Britannica. He hoped that he might be spared to attend their three hundredth meeting, with Sir Hugh Chisholm as Autocrat of the Dinner-Table.”
CHAPTER XXV
ON JOTTINGS
DO you ever jot? If not, pray allow me to introduce you to one of the least expensive and most repaying domestic hobbies. I am myself a most inveterate jotter, both by pen and brush, for I have cases full of water-colour sketches, and bundles of maps, scraps, photos, and oddments. Plenty of entertainment for future years can be laid up in this way. Good stories; real plots too strange for fiction; bon-mots; impressions of scenery; plays; programmes; events; menus; anything that pleases one’s fancy is fish for the jotting net.
In some receptacle—whether drawer, despatch-box, or tin case—fling in your jottings, pencilled in haste while fresh. I have cupboards of notes on Mexico, Iceland, Finland, Lapland, Sicily, Russia, Italy, Morocco, America, Canada—pamphlets, prints, statistics, and other heterogeneous matter.
And to all would-be journalists and aspiring book-writers let me also add: jot down your happy thoughts, smaller inspirations, appreciated quotations, for all may be useful some day.
To begin with, here is a “true fact”—as silly persons will sometimes declare—concerning a banker.
By way of title to my little tale, I will call it: