The only important politician I heard speak this term was Bonar Law, by whom I sat at the Conservative Club dinner one evening. I found him a very pleasant neighbour, and he made as good a speech as I ever heard at a gathering of the kind. I made my way northward to Beaufort for Christmas, feeling a bit of a wreck after a sharp bout of influenza, and enjoyed to the full the breezy sunshine which so often prevails there in mid-winter. There was a shooting-party at New Year, with pleasant _al fresco_ luncheons in sheltered corners of leafless woods, and of an evening music, and ghost stories round a great fire of beechen logs. Of telepathy between the dying and the living Lord Hamilton gave me a striking instance. He had served in South Africa; and at dawn, sleeping on the veldt, was aroused by an unmistakable voice thrice calling his name. The voice was his father's, of whose death he heard next day by cable. The quiet conviction with which he narrated this little incident impressed me much. Staying at an uncle's in Edinburgh on my way south, I met at dinner Lord Dunedin and some other interesting people; and there was some "good {82} talk" on books and poetry. Some one quoted Swinburne's opinion that the two finest lines in the language[9] were Browning's-- "As the king-bird, with ages on his plumes, Travels to die in his ancestral glooms." Three unhackneyed images, from the _City of the Soul_, I noted as admirable: "The distant rook's faint cawing, harsh and sweet." "Black was his hair, as hyacinths by night." "Wet green eyes, like a full chalk stream." The mention of Mallock reminded me of some of his delectable similes: "Miss Drake dropped a short curtsey, which resembled the collapse of a concertina." "Above them a seagull passed, like the drifting petals of a magnolia." "She advanced slowly towards the group, moving along the carpet like a clockwork mouse on wheels." "Her eyes had the brown moisture that glimmers on a slug's back." A cousin of mine at this dinner, lately returned from China, amused me by the information that the pigeon-English word, or phrase, for a bishop was "Number one topside heaven pidgin-man!"