With its bright sea, on which are canoes and scarlet sailed yachts, the vivid green of its grass slopes under the superb trees, the Waegwoltic Club is idyllic. It is the dream of the perfect holiday place come true.
Quite close to it is another club of individuality. It is a club without club-house that has existed in that state for over sixty years.
This is the Studley Quoit Club, which the Prince visited after he had lunched at the Waegwoltic. Its premises are made up of a quoit field, a fence and some trees, and the good sportsmen, its members, as they showed His Royal Highness round, pointed solemnly to a fir to which a telephone was clamped, and said:
"That is our secretary's office."
A table under a spruce was the dining-room, a book of cuttings concerning the club on a desk was the library, while a bench against a fence was the smoking lounge. It is a club of humour and pride, that has held together with a genial and breezy continuity for generations. And it has two privileges, of which it is justly proud: one is the right to fly the British Navy ensign, gained through one of its first members, an admiral; the other is that its rum punch yet survives in a dry land.
The Prince's visit to such a gathering of sportsmen was, naturally, an affair of delightful informality. There was a certain swopping of reminiscences of the King, who had also visited the club, and a certain dry attitude of awe in the President, who, in speaking of the honours the Prince had accepted just before leaving England, said that though the members of the Studley Club felt competent to entertain His Royal Highness as a Colonel of the Guards, as the Grand Master of Freemasons, or even, at a pinch, as a King's Counsel, they felt while in their earthly flesh some trepidation in offering hospitality to a Brother of the Trinity—a celestial office which, the President understood, the Prince had accepted prior to his journey.
It was a happy little gathering, a relief, perhaps, from set functions, and the Prince entered fully into the spirit of the occasion. He drank the famous punch, and signed the Club roll, showing great amusement when some one asked him if he were signing the pledge.
On leaving this quaint club he came in for a cheery mobbing; men and women crowded round him, flappers stormed his car in the hope of shaking hands, while babies held up by elders won the handclasp without a struggle.
A crowded day was closed by a yet more crowded reception. It was an open reception of the kind which I believe I am right in saying the Prince himself was responsible for initiating on this trip. It was a reception not of privileged people bearing invitations, but of the whole city.
The whole city came.