On the evening of my arrival in London, a geographical friend carried me to a notable meeting of his Society at Queen's Hall--the sailor Duke of the Abruzzi lecturing, in quaint staccato {83} Italian-English, on his ascent of Ruanzori, in Equatorial Africa. The King (with the Prince of Wales) was on the platform--stout, grey-bearded, and rather bored, I fancied, at being deprived of his after-dinner cigar: he made a nice little speech of thanks and appreciation. A day or two later came the startling news of the great earthquake in Jamaica, the only Englishman who lost his life being my dear old friend Sir James Fergusson, whose body was found beneath the ruins of a tobacconist's shop in Kingston. He was a man of many gifts and many friends, who had served his country with distinction in almost every part of the Empire; and his death was a real tragedy, as well as a very real grief to me. It was followed very shortly by that of another old friend, Susan Lady Sherborne; and two very pleasant houses in Cornwall Gardens and Brook Street, where I had spent many happy hours, were thus closed to me. There was some talk, a little later, of a memorial to Sir James, the Anglican Bishop of the West Indies suggesting that this should take the form of subscriptions to his church restoration scheme. I ventured strongly to deprecate this proposal in the columns of _The Times_, and my objections were emphatically endorsed by Mr. Fleming, the well-known Presbyterian minister in Belgravia.[10] Two more deaths I may note in the early spring of 1907--the first that of Professor Pelham, president {84} of Trinity; a gentleman and a scholar, a real loss to Oxford, and (incidentally) one of my kindest friends among college heads, just as his brother Sidney (famous slow bowler and future archdeacon) had been thirty years before, when I was a feather-headed freshman at Magdalen. In the same week died our worthy Chancellor, Lord Goschen, after little more than three years of office. Lords Rosebery and Curzon of Kedleston emerged as the favourites among the many candidates "in the air"; but dining with a large party at Lord Teignmouth's a little later, I heard it confidently said that the country parsons would almost certainly "bring Curzon in." They came up, as a matter of fact, in such swarms that they practically swamped the election, Lord Curzon obtaining 1,101 votes against Lord Rosebery's 440. I sat, by the way, at Lord Teignmouth's dinner next an American "scientist" (odious word!) of some kind, who told me some odd things about the Lower Mississippi. That river, he said, had, in 176 years, shortened itself by 242 miles--an average of about l 1/10 miles per year. From this it followed that in the old Oolitic-Silurian period, some 100,000 years ago, the lower Mississippi was upwards of 1,300,000 miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod!