with a high tower on one of the main roads of the estate. His son, Sir Mark’s father, was not less of an original character. He had nothing of the tradition of feudal lords――the family was descended from an old and very rich shipbuilding family in Hull which flourished in the 16th century, had by the 17th century gained a great reputation, and later had business relations with Peter the Great――but he rather represented the type of a fanciful Maecenas, whose hobby it was constantly to remodel buildings or to erect new ones. His ancestors had built ships, he built houses. That amounted to a passion in him, a noble passion, a desire to build, endow and found. And as he was very religious he built churches. He also travelled widely and gathered large collections in his country house. His religion was nominally High Church, but he must have had strong leanings towards Catholicism. His wife, the mother of Sir Mark, was an ardent Catholic. Sir Mark was attached to his mother, and was brought up in the Catholic faith. On his mother’s side Sir Mark had a decided strain of Irish blood, but the English type was predominant in him. His features, however, were of extraordinary gentleness, his eyes large and clear blue in colour, and a wisp of hair would often fall over his brow. He was an English Catholic and cherished in his heart the memory of the not so far distant time when Catholics were persecuted, and restricted in their civil rights. He was a Catholic in a country where the Catholics constitute a small and weak minority, and often he remarked to me that it was his Catholicism that enabled him to understand the tragedy of the Jewish question, since not so long since Catholics had to suffer much in England. His Catholicism did not make him fanatical; it made him rather cosmopolitan, that is to say, catholic in the pure sense of the word. He received an exceptionally careful education and studied hard in Catholic schools before he took his course at Cambridge. The fact that in his early youth he had Jesuit priests among his teachers was often exploited by those who envied him, in a sense which suggested a leaning in him towards Jesuitism. If the term Jesuitism be taken to mean a zeal for Catholicism, then there can be no doubt that this assertion is correct, since Sir Mark was certainly very religious. But if this expression be taken in the customary sense, namely, as equivalent to clerical intrigue, hypocrisy and spiteful hate of other religions, nothing was more remote from the character, the mental outlook and all other attributes of Sir Mark than such a form of Jesuitism. He was incapable equally of dissembling or of servile conduct; he was proud without being arrogant, and was severe and inflexible when truth was at stake. His soul was an open book; he troubled himself neither of career nor of popularity. He possessed an ideal, and this ideal was the sole test of all his thought and actions. At heart he was pious, a good Christian