Who had of misfortune a poor stock,
He’d an excellent life,
And a rattling good wife,
And a safe so full up that the door stuck.
It was a pity that Canon Dives should have been our next guest, but of course he had to take his turn, in spite of a slight change of note: he put in an extract from one of his own sermons: “Hospitality is enjoined on us, as we know, in the Scriptures. We even read that through its exercise some have entertained angels unawares; and though it is probable that the word here translated ‘angels’ should be more correctly rendered ‘messengers,’ the point of the aphorism is the same. Duty is, however, a word which has tended to fall out of our modern vocabulary, perhaps unfortunately, for after all the life which has no guiding principle is a tedious and frequently an ineffective one. But, my dear sisters and brothers, if we cannot cultivate hospitality as a duty, at least let us cultivate it as an act of politeness, or shall we not rather say, of friendship. After all, there is one hostelry which awaits us all alike at the end of our long journey.” Juliet Savage, I see, has appended the words “Dives, when you and I go down to Hell,” a quotation, I think, from Belloc. And next to that is Blanche Engelheim’s charade:
My third is a wife makes her husband my first
And keeps him away from my second:
My whole is a town, though with Temperance cursed,
Where wives by the dozen are reckoned.
Then there is a characteristic scrawl: “Thank God, they taught me how to write at school. Otherwise I should be in a hole. Tommy Lieberts.” But I must not go on wearying my readers with all these trivialities. Let me finish with Lord Hopedale’s quotation, some clever lines from Mainwaring, a poet who was hardly known at the time when they were copied in my Visitors’ Book.