How hateful it is of people to be late. What a lot of temper and time is wasted. Surely unpunctuality is a crime. People with nothing to do seem to make a cult of being behind time, just as busy persons consider punctuality a god. The folk, who sail into a dinner-party twenty minutes after they were invited, ought to find their hosts at the first entrée. One of the most beautiful and charming women who ever came to London, the wife of a diplomat, took the town by storm; she was invited everywhere, but by the end of the season her reign had ceased, and why? “Because,” explained a man well known for hospitality, “she has spoilt more dinners in London during the last three months than anyone I know. Personally, I shall never ask her inside my door again.” The punctuality of kings is proverbial. So is their punctilious way of answering invitations, making calls, and keeping up _la politesse_ of Society. ’Tis vulgar to be late, bourgeois not to answer invitations by return of post, and casual to omit to leave a card when there is not time for a visit. Some people seem too busy to think and too indifferent to care. Marcus Aurelius maintained that life was not theory, but action. What a pity we don’t have a little more action in the realms of politeness and consideration. We owe our host everything. He gives, we take. Let us anyway accept graciously, punctiliously, and considerately, not as if _we_ were doing the favour; the boot is on the other foot. Only eight or nine weeks before her death, Miss Mary Kingsley had dined with me on the eve of her departure from England, full of health and spirits, laughingly saying that she did not quite know why she was going out to South Africa, excepting that she felt she must. She wanted to nurse soldiers; she wished to see war; and, above all, she desired to collect specimens of fish from the Orange River. Armed with some introductions, which I was able to give her, she departed, declaring with her merry laugh she would only be away a few months, and would probably return to collect some more specimen-jars and butterfly-nets before going on to West Africa to continue her studies there. She had only been a few weeks at the Cape when she was taken ill and died. She was a woman of strong character, great determination, a hard worker in every sense of the word, one who had struggled against opposition and some poverty, and the death of Mary Kingsley was a loss to her country. The intrepid explorer was thirty before she had ever been away from our shores. She had up to that time nursed her invalid mother at Cambridge. But the spirit of adventure, the desire to travel, were burning within her; and as soon as the opportunity came she went off by herself to the wild, untrammelled regions of West Africa, and has left a record of her experiences in some interesting volumes.