The duke was talking to me at one time very interestingly about the visit of his father to America. At the time of the French Revolution his father had to flee for his life and came to the United States. He was entertained at Mount Vernon by Washington. He told me that after his father became King of France, he would often hesitate, or refuse to do something or write something which his ministers desired. The king's answer always was: "When I visited that greatest man of all the world, General Washington, at his home, I asked him at one time: 'General, is it not possible that in your long and wonderful career as a soldier and statesman that you have made mistakes?' The general answered: 'I have never done anything which I cared to recall or said anything which I would not repeat,' and the king would say: 'I cannot do that or sign that, because if I do I cannot say for myself what General Washington said of himself.'" The duke asked me to spend a week-end with him at Chantilly, and it is one of the regrets of my life that I was unable to accept. I happened to be in London on two successive Sundays. On the first I went to Westminster Abbey to hear Canon Farrar preach. The sermon was worthy of its wonderful setting. Westminster Abbey is one of the most inspiring edifices in the world. The orator has to reach a high plane to be worthy of its pulpit. I have heard many dull discourses there because the surroundings refuse to harmonize with mediocrity. The sermon of Canon Farrar was classic. It could easily have taken a place among the gems of English literature. It seemed to me to meet whatever criticism the eminent dead, buried in that old mausoleum, might have of these modern utterances. I left the Abbey spiritually and mentally elated. The next Sunday I went to hear Charles Spurgeon. It was a wonderful contrast. Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle was a very plain structure of immense proportions but with admirable acoustics. There was none of the historic enshrining the church, which is the glory of Westminster Abbey, no church vestments or ceremonials. Mr. Spurgeon, a plain, stocky-looking man, came out on the platform dressed in an ordinary garb of black coat, vest, and trousers. It was a vast audience of what might be called middle-class people. Mr. Spurgeon's sermon was a plain, direct, and exceedingly forcible appeal to their judgment and emotions. There was no attempt at rhetoric, but hard, hammerlike blows. As he rose in his indignation and denunciation of some current evils, and illustrated his argument with the Old Testament examples of the punishment of sinners, the audience became greatly excited. One of the officers of the church, in whose pew I sat, groaned aloud and gripped his hands so that the nails left their mark. Others around him were in the same frame of mind and spirit.