Other well-known politicians whom I have noticed here lately have been Lord Beatty and Lord Fisher strolling arm-in-arm beside the Long Canal, and Mr. Jack Jones looking contemptuously at the Kynge's Beestes; and the other day, owing to identical errors in our choice of routes, I bumped into Sir Eric Geddes no fewer than five times during one afternoon in the Maze. The Lord Chancellor is another frequent visitor. For one who has the mitigation of the harsher features of our marriage laws so much at heart, these Courts, where "bluff King Hal" celebrated so many of his cheeriest weddings, have a special charm. It is true that the eighth Henry was a little one-sided in his ideas of reform, but that was the fault of his age rather than himself, and, like the present National Party, he had, as the Lord Chancellor put it, the great heart of the people behind him.
Nor is it only statesmen who haunt the great palace. Nowhere else but here, where James I.'s company of actors, including William Shakspeare, performed, can Mr. Henry Ainley obtain the requisite atmosphere which inspires his swift variety of impersonations, and I am told that his sudden remark of, "Oh, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth," made to one of the attendants who had been for many years in the army, was nearly the cause of a slight fracas. Mr. H. G. Wells has sometimes been seen staring open-mouthed at the painting of the Olympian cosmogony which adorns the ceiling and walls of the Grand Staircase, and in the wych-elm bower Sir J. M. Barrie tells me that he often thinks out the titles of his new plays. It was here, in fact, whilst he was weighing the delicate question, "Why did Alice-Sit-By-the-Fire?" that the sudden happy answer occurred to him, "Because Mary Rose."
P.S.—I forgot to say that Lady Diana Duff-Cooper frequently comes down here. Or, at any rate, if she doesn't, I shall say she does, because I always mention her in my paragraphs.
V.
MY STRONG SUIT.
Not for me the profiteer's