The White City, with its Irish village, and a notable exhibition of French and English pictures, was a great attraction this summer. A kind cousin motored me thither once or twice; and I met a little later at her house some pleasant Italian cavalry officers, smart in their Eton blue uniforms, who were going to jump at the horse-show at Olympia. I went, at their urgent invitation, to see their performance, and was both interested and impressed. As an exhibition of the art of show-jumping it seemed to me unsurpassable. The horse answered the very slightest movement of the leg or body of its rider, who, as he rose to each leap, was so perfectly pivoted on the insides of his knees that his balance remained absolutely unaffected. The French competitors combined pace and dash with their excellent horsemanship; and the finest horses were certainly those ridden by the English. But the cool, quiet, scientific, deliberate riding of the Italians, trained in the finest school in the world, made all their rivals seem, somehow, a little rough and flurried and amateurish; and they gained, as they undoubtedly deserved, the chief honours of the show. The heat in July was great; and I was so depressed, visiting the great National Rose Show in the Botanic Gardens, by the spectacle of 100,000 once lovely blossoms hopelessly wilted and shrivelled, that I fled from London to a brother's shady river-side home near Shepperton. It was reposeful under the big elms overhanging his garden, to watch the boat-laden Thames gliding past; and another pleasure which I enjoyed whilst there was a quite admirable organ-recital given at a neighbouring church--Littleton, I think it was. The kind rector showed us round {116} and gave us tea; and the sight of the many tattered regimental colours (Grenadier Guards and others) hanging on the church walls drew down upon him the following lines, which I sent him next day in acknowledgment of his courtesy:-- THE COLOURS (Hung in churches: no longer [1908] taken into action.) That rent is Talavera; that patch is Inkerman: A hundred times in a hundred climes the battle round them ran. But that is an ended chapter--they will not go to-day: Hang them above as a link of love, where the people come to pray. * * * * * Perhaps when all is quiet, and the moon looks through the pane, Under that shred the splendid dead are marshalled once again, And hear the guns in the desert, and see the lines on the hill, And follow the steel of the lance, and feel that England is England still.