If, as Bacon said, a man dies as often as he loses his friends, then he gains vitality by every additional friendship. To know the Clinton family and their acquaintances is not merely to be let into the inner circle of English country life, to discover for ourselves exactly what sort of people English country folk are, to understand what family tradition and ownership of the land mean to them--it is to enlarge our own range of experience and to increase our own stock of genuine happiness, by adding to our mental life true friends--and friends that are always available. For often the friends of flesh and blood cannot be reached when we need them most; perhaps they are asleep, or away on a journey; but the staunch old friends introduced to us by novelists never deny themselves. Is not this a fairly good reason why, among all the novels we read, some at all events should be selected for the immanent charm of their characters? I know how uncritical it is to admire any work of art that possesses the element of cheerfulness; but suppose our reading of novels were entirely confined to the works of Maxim Gorki? Why should we always select acquaintances in fiction that we always avoid in real life? Is it the same instinct that makes so many persons love to go slumming? There is perhaps rather too strong a flavour of tea in these stories, but that no doubt is a legitimate part of their realism. The sacred rite of afternoon tea plays fully as big a part in English fiction as it plays in English life. Tea--which would be an intolerable interruption to business or to golf among normal Americans--is never superfluous to the British. Among the hundreds of English novels that you have read, can you recall a single instance where any character _declined_ a cup of tea? And, in terrible crises or trivial vexations, is not the following exclamation familiar--"I am dying for my tea!" I sometimes think that if the house should be destroyed by fire at three o'clock, half-past four would find the family taking tea on the lawn. I remember, on a voyage to Alaska, a vigorous old English woman who appeared on deck every day between four and five, and when she saw the circulation of the china, a look of holy rapture dawned in her eyes, and from her lips came an ecstatic cry, "Ah, is there tea going?" It must be wonderful to love anything on earth so much as the English love their tea. Two months after writing the above paragraph, I received testimony which delightfully supports the view expressed. An Englishman informs me, that after the big sea-fight of Jutland, he had the privilege of conversing with an English blue-jacket who was perched aloft during the whole of that terrific experience. There he remained under orders, in the thick of the battle, with the bolts of death flying all about him. On being asked how he felt, the young man exclaimed with a tone of regret, "Well, of course, I had to miss my tea."