I went up to Haytor rocks on 25 April 1922, having noticed in my father’s diary that we were there on 25 April 1862, and that I “climbed up both the rocks with great agility.” I climbed up both the rocks again, but cannot say I did it with agility--the sixty years had told. A fortnight later I was out near there again, beating the parish bounds: a solemnity performed each year on the Monday after Roodmas. It was a long procession at the start, but quite short at the finish five hours later on; and as we went along, I heard men saying things in French and others replying with a word or two of Japanese. My thoughts again went back to sixty years ago. Saying things in French would have been quite as heinous then as saying things in German now. After being our ally in the Crimean war, the new Napoleon was threatening us with invasion, just as his uncle had threatened our progenitors sixty years before: volunteers were being raised again, as in the old Napoleon’s time, to fight against the French invaders; and the old hereditary hatred was blazing out afresh. It was the Saxon hatred of the Norman, kept alive by endless wars with France. In 1690 the French burned Teignmouth and anchored in Torbay, and all the West was roused by beacon fires from Haytor to the other heights; and the French seemed bent upon another trial. _Buonaparte in Britain_ is the sort of book that people used to read, “a catalogue of French cruelties, and a short appeal to mothers, widows, wives, sisters and daughters upon the brutality of the French armies.” It is full of the same charges that were made against the Germans in the war of 1914. And in 1814 there was the same wild joy when victory came at last. They had a festival at Moreton, 26 July 1814, with a dinner and a procession like a Lord Mayor’s Show. The programme has been preserved. ‘Smiths at work in a cart, beating weapons of war into implements of husbandry.’ ‘The four corporals late of the Moreton volunteers.’ Blaze led the woolcombers and Crispin led the cordwainers, but the true patron saint was ‘Bacchus on a tun, dressed in character, with a bottle, glass, &c., drawn on a car.’ And at the dinner there was a cask of cider at the foot of every table. My grandfather got Camden’s _History of Napoleon Bonaparte_ when it first came out, and I have the volumes here. The first volume came out in 1814 with a title-page and preface saying that the history would be continued to the restoration of the Bourbon Dynasty in the present year. But the second volume has a different title-page, recognizing the fresh start the author had to make at what would otherwise have been the end. “We had fondly imagined that a total end was put to the war.... But, alas! Napoleon no sooner perceived a fit opportunity,” etc. etc.