This was Marie Corelli, to whom the work of restoration of Harvard House had been entrusted; and her guests that day saw it just as John Harvard himself saw it as a child. In that house where this most modern of twentieth-century novelists awaited her guests, the sixteenth-century maiden Katherine Rogers, passed her early days, and in 1605 went thence as the bride of Robert Harvard the merchant, to his home in Southwark. Between that place and the small country town on the Avon their little son spent his childish years. And just as the river deepened and widened as it joined the infinity of the ocean, so John Harvard’s youthful intelligence deepened and widened in the great ocean of learning. Far, far away it bore fruit—not only in his own generation, but the waves of scholarly influence have rippled down through successive decades to the present day, when the College he founded in America—the first established in the New World—sends forth her men in thousands to all parts of the globe, and the name of Harvard is an honoured household word through the length and breadth of the world. Although I had been twice to America and knew that the best of the culture and learning in the United States emanated from Boston and Harvard, I had not then realised that the famous University was three hundred years old—contemporaneous with our own Will Shakespeare—nor that its founder had been christened in our little old English Mecca. Miss Marie Corelli had a bright word for everyone; flitted hither and thither like a bee, made speeches charmingly, and yet it must have been a day of great nervous strain for this little lady. A woman of taste and refinement, a woman of organisation—as the occasion revealed, with all its details of a luncheon for a hundred and fifty people, as well as an opening ceremony—and withal, what a strangely imaginative mind! Almost a seer, a mystic, a religious dreamer, a hard worker, a strange but lovable personality—such is Marie Corelli. Many men and women who attain great ends are egotistical—and why not? What others admire they may surely be allowed to appreciate also. It is the conceit of ignorance that is so detestable. The assurance of untutored youth that annoys. The American Ambassador was, as ever, gentle, persuasive, eloquent, delightful. We had a long conversation on Harvard, whose virtues he extolled; but then Mr. Whitelaw Reid is at heart a literary man and would-be scholar, besides having enough brains to appreciate brains in others.