So it was that I went with some shrinking, yet still under the glamour of the old Oxford loyalty, to pay my visit at the Grange in 1908, walking thither from the house of one of the stanchest Imperialists in Canada, where I had been lunching. "You are going to see Mr. Goldwin Smith?" my host had said. "I have not crossed his threshold for twenty years. I abhor his political views. All the same, we are proud of him in Canada!" When I entered the drawing-room, which was rather dark, though it was a late May afternoon, there rose slowly from its chair beside a bright fire a figure I shall never forget. I had a fairly clear remembrance of Goldwin Smith in his earlier days. This was like his phantom, or, if one may say so, without disrespect--his mummy. Shriveled and spare, yet erect as ever, the iron-gray hair, closely shaven beard, dark complexion, and black eyes still formidably alive, made on me an impression at once of extreme age and unabated will. A prophet!--still delivering his message--but well aware that it found but few listeners in a degenerate world. He began immediately to talk politics, denouncing English Imperialism, whether of the Tory or the Liberal type. Canadian loyalty to the Empire was a mere delusion. A few years, he said, would see the Dominion merged in the United States; and it was far best it should be so. He spoke with a bitter, almost a fierce energy, as though perfectly conscious that, although I did not contradict him, I did not agree with him; and presently, to my great relief, he allowed the talk to slip back to old Oxford days. [Illustration: GOLDWIN SMITH] Two years later he died, still confident of the future as he dreamt it. The "very rough times" that he foresaw have indeed come upon the world. But as to the rest, I wish he could have stood with me, eight years after this conversation, on the Scherpenberg Hill, held by a Canadian division, the approach to its summit guarded by Canadian sentries, and have looked out over that plain, where Canadian and British graves, lying in their thousands side by side, have forever sealed in blood the union of the elder and the younger nations.