Talks with him were always a liberal education, because they gave first-hand impressions of an excellent observer in regard to many characters whose biographies are often written by persons who have not even seen the subject of the biography. It was thus thrilling for me, who had always admired the career of Mrs. Norton and read a recent account of her life, to hear that at a time when the differences between Mr. and Mrs. George Norton were most acute the Chief Baron put his house at the disposal of both so that Mrs. Norton should see her children there. She was accustomed to meet them in a room at one end of which George Pollock (on at least one occasion) sat and read the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ while she played with them at the other end. Usually his sister Mary was there. The heroines of history are not always wholly approved by their contemporaries. An old man, long since dead, told me that the advent of Florence Nightingale was not at first popular with the soldiers in the Crimea, because they felt embarrassed by the idea of female nursing. Similarly, Mrs. Norton was thought by some to be ‘playing to the gallery,’ and in the opinion of Baron Martin ‘talked to too many men’ on one occasion when crossing the Atlantic. But George Pollock nevertheless sympathised, as his father did, with her position as regards her children. His talk, as might be expected, shed light on social usages of the past. One night the Duchess of Somerset was driving near Wimbledon and her carriage fell into a ditch. George Pollock was passing and assisted her and the coachman to get the vehicle out of the ditch and collect various toys and pieces of china back into the carriage. The next morning the Duchess, ‘in a refined manner,’ sent a military friend to convey her acknowledgments but did not come herself, since, for aught she knew, her benefactor might have had a ‘vulgar wife who would return the call.’ He mentioned that baths first came into fashion in the ’fifties, and caused much annoyance to a certain old colonel because they encumbered the officers’ luggage. ‘These young men,’ he complained, ‘keep washing themselves till there is not a bit of natural smell about them.’ The only unpardonable smell was of course tobacco. Even onions were preferable. Though the late King Edward introduced smoking as far as he could, even when his hosts drove him into the stable-room, George Pollock, despite his respect for the Church, felt it his duty, even in 1883, to remonstrate with a curate who smoked a cigar at a garden party. His attitude to the divorce question interested me. He mentioned that all the lawyers of the time strongly supported the Act of 1857 in spite of ecclesiastical opposition. But he felt himself ‘incompetent to form an opinion’ on the question, which curiously illustrated the survival of the old Catholic tradition that marriage should be an institution entirely subject to ecclesiastical control and jurisdiction.