At Madeira I went ashore to see the Consul (Boyle, a cousin of Glasgow's) and his pleasant wife, sat for an hour with them enjoying the enchanting view, and returned on board in company (as I afterwards discovered) with three professional card-sharpers, who, having been warned off Madeira, were returning more or less incog. to England. The last days of our voyage were made in a fog that never lifted—an anxious time for my friend the captain. We never sighted Ushant light at all, and steamed far past Cherbourg, to which we had to return dead slow, our dreary foghorn sounding continually all night long. However, it cleared quite suddenly, and we raced across the Channel in bright sunshine, but reached Southampton so late that a kind brother who had come down to meet me there had been obliged to return to London.
[[1]] Once quite unjustly—but that was not his fault, for he acted only on "information received." This reminds me of Mr. Gladstone's story of his schoolfellow Arthur Hallam (of In Memoriam fame). "Hallam," said W. E. G., indulging in some Etonian reminiscences at his own table when not far off ninety, "was a singularly virtuous boy; but he was once flogged by Dr. Keat, though quite unjustly. When we came into school one day, the master, Mr. Knapp—("He was a sad scoundrel, and got into prison later," the old gentleman added in parenthesis, "and I subscribed to relieve his necessities"),—said at once, 'Præpostor, put Hallam's name in the bill for breaking my window.'—'Please, sir, I never broke any window of yours,' cried Hallam, starting up. 'Præpostor,' said Mr. Knapp, 'put Hallam's name in the bill for lying, and breaking my window.'—'Upon my sacred word of honour, sir,' said Hallam, jumping up again, 'I never touched your window.' But Mr. Knapp merely said, 'Præpostor, put Hallam's name in the bill for swearing, and lying, and breaking my window!'
[[2]] Tom Brown's School Days (ed. 1839), pp. 370, 371.
[[3]] Replaced in 1920 by a new and sonorous peal. They still struck the quarters! but anyhow in tune.
[[4]] "Were the Vanderbilts as great a power in the American railway and financial world in your time as they are now?" some one asked an Englishman who had at one time spent some years in the United States. "No," he replied; "I think when I was out there they were only Vanderbuilding!"
[[5]] His quiet sojourn at St. James's, which he had himself built and inaugurated five years previously, was a sadly short one. I heard with deep regret of his death there on St. Benedict's, Day (March 21) of this year, 1910.
[[6]] See ante, page [130], note.
[[7]] This straining of the sight precipitated, I think, the affection of the eyes which was to prove so troublesome.
[[8]] Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, chap. ix.
[[9]] "La crême de la guillotine," as our Parisian monk, Dom Denis, described them.