Buda-Pest, September 18, 1939. I was introduced to the great Hungarian novelist, Myslok. He asked me how many of his works I had read; I said none. As he seemed disappointed, I added that I had recently had to spend most of my time reading geography. “Geography!” he said. “What is that? It is only the science of the earth, and what is earth? Only one big piece of dirt”—he pronounced the word with great emphasis and contempt. I was rather nettled, and said I supposed at that rate geography was very much the same as reading modern novels. He asked me which of his characters I liked best: I said I had not read any of his works. He said that was very strange, because they had all been translated into English. I said I always found translations of foreign books dull reading; somehow the thing altered so much in the process. He agreed with me enthusiastically, and said that when his last novel was translated the English publisher had insisted on cutting out the part where the hero (I forget his name now) trampled on the heroine because he did not like her dress. I was feeling rather vague and inattentive, and asked, “Did it kill her?” He said no, but she limped like a crab all the rest of the book. He then asked if I did not think this the finest book he had ever written. I said I had not had the pleasure of reading any of his works. He then asked me to call on him, but he looks so dreadfully like poor Mr. Hoskyns that I really don’t think I can. Mainz, November 2, 1939. There is a great Congress of Food Reformers going on here, and the hotel-keepers are in despair. Our waiter told us that we were the only people in the hotel who would take the table d’hôte, and even of the diners _à la carte_ three complained that they were starving owing to a shortage of their favourite diet. Dates, he said, were what they wanted mostly, and all the dates in the town had been sold out long since. “Why they not go hold blinking Congress in the Sahara?” he said, polishing the plates furiously. We went to a lecture on the nutritive qualities of the locust, which I had always hitherto regarded as a sort of _pis aller_, and I am afraid I came away unconverted. Any number of journalists were present, and we asked the waiter afterwards whether they did not help out the cuisine rather; but he said they took nothing except beer. * * * * *