This seems to be a very rambling sort of chapter, but who has a right to ramble if it be not an old lady who has seen more than seventy summers? I must not finish this chapter without giving a place in it to George Hammond the historian. I never knew, I think, a more delightful conversationalist. He was often at Greylands, and I was always trying to draw him out, having that worst habit of hostesses, the habit of making a man talk on his own subject. Once, for example, I asked him what he thought was the really salient characteristic of the early twentieth century (his special period) which distinguished the people of that time from ourselves. “I have often wondered,” he said, “but I think you get nearest to the truth by saying that they had no sense of humour—that is, they had not got what we mean by the sense of humour. I’ve been at the British Museum a good deal lately (that it, at the Cippenham annexe), looking through the old newspapers of that period, the cheap newspapers especially, and I think it’s quite impossible to suppose that the people who liked to have that kind of thing served up with their breakfasts had any sense of humour at all. If you took one of our grandfathers and put him down opposite a series of drawings like, say, McGillivray’s, I don’t think he’d see anything in them. Or take that joke in _Punch_ last week—did you see last week’s _Punch_? Well, there are two men travelling by railway, and one looks out of the window and says, ‘Cholsey and Moulsford, change for Wallingford.’ And the other man says, ‘I should jolly well think you did.’ Clever, isn’t it? But, you know, I don’t believe they’d have seen anything funny in it in the twenties.” There, I had forgotten the humorists! Lancelot Briggs-Wilde, what a creator of merriment! And then there was the old Bishop of Birkenhead, who had the reputation of being quite unrivalled as a _raconteur_. It was he, I remember, who described to us how once at a missionary festival he had a very shy curate staying with him; and at breakfast, it seems, the eggs were not all that they should have been. The curate had one that was really very far gone, and the Bishop, by way of apology, said, “I’m afraid, Mr. So-and-so, your egg’s not very good.” “Oh, not at all,” was the mild reply, “_it’s excellent in parts_.” We all told the Bishop that he ought to send that up to _Punch_, but I don’t know if he ever did.