“Please don’t look at me, for you will make me so nervous I shall not be able to write it at all.” Maybe this nervousness was the result of a bad attack of influenza from which she was just then recovering. “Oh yes, I get influenza here,” she said, “though I never get fever in Africa, and I am only waiting for my brother to go off on some expedition to pack up my bundles and do likewise myself.” She found herself among several friends that evening, the great Sir William Crookes was also one of the dinner guests, and she had read a paper at the British Association a few months before, when he had been President. Then she knew Mr. Bompas, the brother-in-law of Frank Buckland, and by a stroke of good luck I was able to introduce her to Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, who was afterwards appointed Director of the Natural History Museum at Kensington. They had not met before, and seemed to find in zoology many subjects of mutual interest. Mary Kingsley had a keen humour. In her case the spirit of fun did not override the etiquette of good taste as it is so often inclined to do. Just before dinner one February night in 1907, I was expecting friends; but when turning on the drawing-room lights a fuse went, and half of the lamps were extinguished. It was an awkward moment. I telephoned to the electrician, who could only send a boy. Visitors arrived, and my agitation was becoming rather serious, for the fuse refused to be adjusted, when Sir William and Lady Ramsay were announced. I rushed at the former. “Can you put in an electric fuse?” I asked. “Certainly,” was the reply. “For Heaven’s sake, go down to the kitchen,” I continued. “There is a hopeless boy there who evidently cannot manage it, and we are in comparative darkness.” Down the steps the great chemist bounded, followed by the parlourmaid, and landed, much to the surprise of everybody, at the kitchen door. There seemed to be barely time for him to have reached the electric box, before the light sprang into being. Then he washed his hands and came to dinner, smiling. What a contrast to the fumbling of the British workman was the dexterity of the scientific man. Two evenings later, Sir Joseph Swan, the inventor of the incandescent burner, was dining at my house and I told him the story. “I have no doubt Ramsay had often done it before,” he said; “for when electric light first came in I never seemed to go to any house that I wasn’t asked to attend to the light. In fact, I quite looked upon it as part of the evening’s entertainment to put things in order before the proceedings began. But I think _you_ have inherited your father’s gift as a _raconteur_, and that is paying you a high compliment, for he was one of the best I ever knew. Only the other day I was retailing some of his stories about Ruskin.” And then he reminded me of the following: