These were the last peaceful days before the hurricane which it is fashionable to say will sweep away all that comfortable, easy, country-home England. I do not believe it will do anything of the kind. The war will certainly leave little of parasitic England. The vast accumulations of inherited wealth are being swept now into the hopper of war. It will no longer be possible for Francis Williams to declare that eighty per cent of the wealth of England belongs to six per cent of the population, and that nearly half of the national income goes to ten percent of the people. But Churchill’s type of good living, country house and all, will not disappear, for it is based upon his own labors, as we could see demonstrated before our eyes. After the card game Mr. Churchill went upstairs to his workroom and about an hour later came down with the manuscript of a 1,500-word article for the _Daily Telegraph_ which he had just dictated. I read it with professional envy, for in only a few minutes he had produced one of his characteristic gems, informative, learned, witty, for which he would receive a remuneration about equivalent to the annual income of an average American newspaperman. He frequently surpasses this feat in economizing time. He used to write many of his newspaper articles on the way up to London in his automobile, dictating to his secretary. Churchill has now by act of Parliament completely dictatorial powers and can order any British citizen to perform any service or can confiscate any property, but he has yet to be criticized for ruling arbitrarily. He hates silly questions and will walk away from a bore, or cut a hypocrite down with an epigram. Whisky, he believes, is a boon to mankind, and he has never been the worse, but often the better for it. The two men he most abhors in our time are Hitler and Trotzky, both teetotalers. He is a gourmand, that is to say a man with a sensitive taste in food who likes a lot of it. Once he was in ill health and went to a noted specialist who, contrary to the fashion of the day and despite the patient’s well-upholstered body, advised him to eat more food. He follows the prescription enthusiastically.