A further encounter took place of something the same kind--the duke himself told me of this--from which he emerged the victor. He had, he said, received a letter from Lady Herbert of Lee, in which she begged him to contribute L100 toward the total required for the restoration of some Catholic church, and his answer had been as follows: DEAR LADY HERBERT. I shall be very happy to give you the sum you name, for a purpose so excellent as yours. At the same time I may say that I am myself about to restore the Protestant church at Strathfieldsaye, and I do not doubt that you will aid me by sending me a similar sum. Only, in that case, I think no money need pass between us. In a kindred vein was his answer to another application, addressed to him, in formal terms, by a committee of the inhabitants of Tiverton. When the first duke was merely known as a soldier, the Tivertonians had begun to erect, on a neighboring hill near Wellington, a monumental column in his honor; but subsequently, when he came to show himself to the British public, not as a great general, but as an obstinate and intolerable Tory, the Radical Tivertonians refused to carry on the work farther. The column was left unfinished, as it stands at the present day; and the second duke, many years later, was petitioned, for the credit of the neighborhood, to finish it at his own cost. His answer to the petitioners was, so he told me, this: GENTLEMEN. It I were to finish that monument it would be a monument to nothing. As it stands, it is a monument to your own ingratitude.