TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

THE ROOF GARDEN AND POMPEIAN FOUNTAIN AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS.
(From the Painting by Yoshio Markino.)

TWENTY YEARS

OF MY LIFE

BY

DOUGLAS SLADEN

AUTHOR OF “WHO’S WHO”

WITH FOUR COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS AND TWELVE PORTRAITS

BY

YOSHIO MARKINO

NEW YORK

E·P·DUTTON & COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Printed in Great Britain by

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,

BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S.E.,

AND BUNGAY SUFFOLK.

AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

TO

JEROME K. JEROME

ONE OF THE EARLIEST AND DEAREST OF MY

LITERARY FRIENDS

INTRODUCTION

When I wrote Who’s Who, sixteen or seventeen years ago, I used to receive shoals of funny letters from people who wanted, or did not want, to be included, and now, when I have not edited the book for more than a dozen years, I still receive letters of criticism on the way in which I conduct it, and usually consign them to limbo. A few months ago, however, I received the subjoined letter, which is so out of the ordinary that I quote it to show what illustrious correspondents I have. I must not attach the author’s name, though every grown-up man in the civilised world would be interested to know it.

“Dear Sir,

“Kindly cease to omit my name from your ever-increasing list of persons as annually placed before the public for sale at any price it is worth. Just put me down in place of Victoria Alice, who is an American pure and simple, while I am left out in the cold. I am the daughter of King Edward VII....[^[1]] I am the legal spouse of Nicholas II, Czar of Russia, being legally married to him in 1890, Aug. 14, a ratification of which occurrence was held by me in hallway of British Embassy, Paris, France, 1900, same date. Just give me a notice, will you, instead of harping on the sisterhood of King George V, who form among themselves a similar affair to that held by female contingent of Synagogue, doing more damage in the community, and eventually in the world, than any one set of people anywhere, with method so secret that even Rabbi is unable to uncover the original design known as main point in England.

“Sincerely,

“Etc., etc.

“October 23, 1913.”

[1]. This portion of the letter could not be printed.

If I could tell all I know about the interesting people I have met, the book would read like my own Who’s Who re-written by Walter Emanuel for publication in Punch. As it is, the book contains a great deal of information about celebrities which could never appear in Who’s Who, and all the best anecdotes which I remember about my friends, except those which would turn my friends into enemies, and even some of those I mean to give in this preface, minus the names, to prevent their being lost to posterity.

The twenty years of my life which I here present to readers are the twenty years which I spent at 32, Addison Mansions, Kensington, during which I was in constant intercourse with most of the best-known writers of the generation. The book is therefore largely taken up with personal reminiscences and impressions of them—indeed, not a few of them, such as Conan Doyle, J. K. Jerome, I. Zangwill, H. A. Vachell, Charles Garvice, Eden Phillpotts, Mr. and Mrs. C. N. Williamson, Mrs. Croker, Mrs. Perrin, Madame Albanesi, Compton Mackenzie, and Jeffery Farnol’s mentor, wrote specially for this book an account of the circumstances which led to their being authors. For it must be remembered that the majority of authors start life in some other profession, and drift into authorship as they discover their aptitude for it. Conan Doyle was a doctor, in busy practice when he wrote The White Company; Jerome was a lawyer’s clerk when he wrote Three Men in a Boat; both Hardy and Hall Caine began as architects; Zangwill was a teacher, and W. W. Jacobs was a clerk in the General Post Office.

An index of the authors of whom personal reminiscences are told in this book will be found at the end.

Its earlier chapters deal with my life prior to our going to Addison Mansions, giving details of my parentage and bringing-up, of the seven years I spent in Australia and the United States, and my long visits to Canada and Japan. From that point forward, except for the four chapters which deal with the writing of my books, the present volume is occupied chiefly with London literary society from 1891 to 1911.

It was in the ’nineties that the late Sir Walter Besant’s efforts to bring authors together by the creation of the Authors’ Club, and their trade union, the Authors’ Society, bore fruit. English writers, who had hitherto been the reverse of gregarious, began to meet each other very often at receptions and clubs.

In those days one made new friends among well-known authors, artists, and theatrical people every day, at places like the Authors’, Arts, Vagabonds, Savage, Hogarth and Argonauts’ Clubs, the Idler teas, and women’s teas at the Pioneer Club, the Writers’ Club, and the Women Journalists’, and various receptions in Bohemia. It was almost an offence to spend an entire afternoon, or an entire evening, in any other way, and though it made inroads on one’s time for work, and time for exercise, it gave one an intimacy, which has lasted, with men and women who have since risen to the head of their professions. That intimacy is reflected in these pages, which show a good deal of the personal side of the literary movement of the ’nineties and the literary club life of the period.

I have endeavoured in this book to interest my readers in two ways—by telling them the circumstances in my bringing-up, and my subsequent life, which made me a busy man of letters instead of a lawyer, and by giving them my reminiscences of friends who have won the affection of the public in literature, in art, and on the stage.

As I feel that a great many of my readers will be much more interested in my reminiscences than in my life, I advise them to begin at Chapter VI—or, better still, Chapter VIII—from which point forward, with the exceptions of Chapters XVI-XIX, the book is taken up more with the friends I have had the good fortune to know than with myself.

Before concluding, I will give three or four stories too personal to have names attached to them.

I once heard a Bishop, who in those days was a smug and an Oxford Don, remark to a circle of delighted undergraduates, “My brother Edward thinks I’m an awful fool.” As his brother Edward was Captain of the Eton Eleven, and amateur champion of something or other, there is no doubt that his brother Edward did think him an awful fool.

I once heard an author, at the very moment that Robert Louis Stevenson, as we had learnt by telegram that afternoon, was lying in state under the sky at Samoa, awaiting burial, say, replying to the toast of his health at a public dinner, that he had been led to write his most popular book by the perusal of Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

“I said to myself,” he naïvely remarked, “that if I could not write a better book than that in six weeks, I would shoot myself.”

The same man, when another of his books had been dramatised, and he was called before the curtain on the first night of its production, informed the audience that it was a very good play, and that it would be a great success when it was decently acted. So complacent was he about it that the friend who tried to pull him back behind the curtain by the tails of his dress-coat failed until he had split the coat up to the collar.

This man has the very best instincts, but he has a genius for poking his finger into people’s eyes.

I once knew the brother of a Bishop, who left the Church of England, and went to America to be a Unitarian clergyman, because he wished to marry a pretty American heiress, and he had a wife already in England. By and by his new sect heard of it, and expelled him with conscious or unconscious humour for “conduct incompatible with membership in the Unitarian Church.” He hired a hall from the piano company opposite, and nearly the whole congregation moved across the street with him. Except in the matter of monogamy, he was a most Christian man, and his congregation had the highest respect and affection for him and his bigamous wife; and this in spite of the fact that he constantly alluded to the Trinity as he warmed to his subject in sermons for the edification of Unitarians. If he noticed it, he corrected himself and said Triad. He was one of the most delightful men I ever met, and his influence on his congregation was of the very best.

In the days when I saw so much of actors at our own flat, and went every Sunday night to the O.P., I was once asked to arbitrate in a dispute between an actor-manager and the critic of a great daily, who had exchanged “words” in the theatre. The critic either dreaded the expense of a lawsuit, or had no desire to make money if he could obtain the amende honorable. I heard all they had to say, and then I turned round and said to the great actor, “Did you say that about Mr. ——?” and he replied with an Irishism which I got accepted as an apology: “I really couldn’t say; I’m such a liar that I never know what I have said and what I haven’t said.”

These are stories to which I could not append the names, but the reader will find as good and better if he turns up the names of S. H. Jeyes, Oscar Wilde and Phil May in the index.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

COLOURED PICTURES BY YOSHIO MARKINO

PORTRAITS BY YOSHIO MARKINO

INDEX OF REMINISCENCES

At the end of the book will be found an index of the well-known people about whom personal reminiscences or new facts are told—such as Prince Alamayu of Abyssinia, Mme. Albanesi, Sir Edwin Arnold, Lena Ashwell, Sarah Bernhardt, Sir Walter Besant, Rolf Boldrewood, Hall Caine, Dion Clayton Calthrop, Mrs. Clifford, Bishop Creighton, Mrs. Croker, Sir A. Conan Doyle, Lord Dundonald, Sir J. Forbes-Robertson, Charles Garvice, Bishop Gore, Sarah Grand, George Grossmith, Thomas Hardy, Bret Harte, W. E. Henley, Robert Hichens, John Oliver Hobbes, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Anthony Hope, J. K. Jerome, S. H. Jeyes, C. Kernahan, A. H. Savage Landor, Maarten Maartens, Compton MacKenzie, Yoshio Markino, “Bob” Martin, George Meredith, Frankfort Moore, Dr. G. E. Morrison of Peking, F. W. H. Myers, Nansen, Cardinal Newman, Mrs. Perrin, Eden Phillpotts, Rt. Hon. Sir Geo. Reid, Whitelaw Reid, Lord Roberts, the late Lord Salisbury, F. Hopkinson Smith, Father Stanton, Mrs. Flora Annie Steel, August Strindberg, Mark Twain, H. A. Vachell, J. M. Whistler, Percy White, Oscar Wilde, Mr. and Mrs. C. N. Williamson, Lord Willoughby de Broke, Margaret Woods, Sir Charles Wyndham and Israel Zangwill.

D. S.

TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

CHAPTER I
MY LIFE (1856-1886)

I was born on February 5, 1856, in the town-house of my maternal grandfather. My father, a solicitor by profession, who died in the last days of 1910, at the age of eighty-six, was almost the youngest of the sixteen children of my paternal grandparents, John Baker Sladen, D.L., J.P., of Ripple Court, near Dover, and Etheldred St. Barbe. The name St. Barbe has been freely bestowed on their descendants because the first St. Barbe in this country has the honour of appearing on the Roll of Battle Abbey.

My maternal grandparents were John Wheelton and Mary Wynfield. Mr. Wheelton (I was never able to discover any other person named Wheelton, till I found, among the survivors of the loss of the Titanic, a steward called Wheelton; truly the name has narrowly escaped extinction), from whom I get my third Christian name, was in business as a shipper on the site of the General Post Office, and was Master of the Cordwainers’ Company. He was Sheriff of London in the year of Queen Victoria’s marriage. Though he lived at Meopham near Tonbridge, he came from Manchester, and I am, therefore, a Lancashire man on one side of the house. But oddly enough I have never been to Manchester.

Charles Dickens, when he first became a writer, was a frequent guest at his hospitable table, and has immortalised him in one of his books. He was in a way immortalised by taking a leading part in one of the most famous law cases in our history, Stockdale versus Hansard. As Sheriff he had to levy an execution on Hansard, the printer to the House of Commons, who had published in the reports of the debates a libel on Mr. Stockdale. The House declared it a breach of privilege, and sentenced the Sheriff to be imprisoned in the Speaker’s house, from which he was shortly afterwards released on the plea of ill-health. But with the City of London as well as the Law Courts against them, the members of the House of Commons determined to avoid future collisions by bringing in a bill to make the reports of the proceedings of Parliament privileged and this duly became law.

I have in my possession an enormous silver epergne, supported by allegorical figures of Justice and others, which the City of London presented to my grandfather in honour of this occasion, with a few survivors of a set of leather fire-buckets, embellished with the City arms, which now do duty as waste-paper baskets.

I was baptised in Trinity Church, Paddington, and shortly afterwards my parents went to live at 22, Westbourne Park Terrace, Paddington, continuing there till 1862.

It was in this year that my last sister, Mrs. Young, was born, just before we changed houses. My eldest sister, who married the late Rev. Frederick Robert Ellis, only son of Robert Ridge Ellis, of the Court Lodge, Yalding, Kent, and for many years Rector of Much Wenlock, was born in 1850. My second sister, who married Robert Arundel Watkins, eldest surviving son of the Rev. Bernard Watkins, of Treeton, and afterwards of Lawkland Hall, Yorkshire, was born in 1851; and my brother, the Rev. St. Barbe Sydenham Sladen, who holds one of the City livings, St. Margaret Patten, was born in 1858.

My father, having become better off by the death of my two grandfathers in 1860 and 1861, bought a ninety-six years’ lease of Phillimore Lodge, Campden Hill, which I sold in 1911.

I believe that I never left London till I was four years old, when we all went to stay with my uncle, the Rev. William Springett, who still survives, at Dunkirk Vicarage, near Canterbury. While we were there I first saw and dipped my hands in the sea, which I was destined to traverse so often, at a place called Seasalter, to which we drove from Dunkirk.

From 1862 to 1868, when my mother died, we children generally spent the summer at Brighton, from which my father went away to a moor in Yorkshire for the grouse-shooting. As a child, I soon grew tired of Brighton, which seemed so like a seaside suburb of London. I used to think that the sea itself, which had no proper ships on it, was like a very large canal. I longed for real sea, like we had seen at Deal, where we went to stay in my grandmother Sladen’s dower-house, shortly after our visit to Dunkirk. There we had seen a full-rigged ship driven on to the beach in front of our house in a gale, and had seen the lifeboat and the Deal luggers putting out to wrecks on the Goodwin Sands, and had seen the largest ships of the day in the Downs. I loved the woods we had rambled in, between Dunkirk and Canterbury, even better still. I never found the ordinary seaside place tolerable till I became enamoured of golf. Without golf these places are marine deserts.

I never tasted the real delights of the country till we went in the later ’sixties to a farmhouse on the edge of the Duke of Rutland’s moors above Baslow, in Derbyshire. With that holiday I was simply enchanted. For rocks meant fairyland, as they still do, to me. And there I had, besides rocks, like the Cakes of Bread, the clear, trout-haunted mountain-river Derwent, and romantic mediæval architecture like Haddon Hall. Besides, we were allowed to run wild on the farm, to sail about the shallow pond in a cattle-trough, to help to make Wensleydale cheeses (this part of Derbyshire arrogates the right to use the name), and to hack the garden about as much as we liked. It was there that I had my first real games of Red Indians and Robinson Crusoe, and there that I had the seeds of my passion for architecture implanted in me.

We drove about a great deal—to the Peak, with its caverns and its queer villages, to the glorious Derbyshire Dales, and to great houses like Chatsworth. Certainly Baslow was my fairy-godmother in authorship, and my literary aspirations were cradled in Derbyshire. My father gave me a good schooling in the beauties of England. We were always taken to see every place of any interest for its scenery, its buildings, or its history, which could be reached in a day by a pair of horses from the house, where we were spending our summer holidays. He had the same flair for guide-books as I have, and taught me how to use them intelligently.

Up till 1864 I was taught by governesses with my elder sisters. There were three of them, Miss Morrison, Miss Bray, and Miss Rose Sara Paley, an American Southerner, whose parents had been ruined by the Civil War. She was a very charming and intelligent woman, and taught my eldest sister to compose in prose and verse. For a long time this sister was the author of our home circle. I was too young to try composition in those days, but seeing my eldest sister do it familiarised me with the idea of it. I also had a music mistress, because it was hoped that playing the piano would restore my left hand to its proper shape, after the extraordinary accident which I had when I was only two years old. She was Miss Rosa Brinsmead, a daughter of the John Brinsmead who founded the famous piano-making firm. The point which I remember best about her was that she had fair ringlets like Princess (now Queen) Alexandra, who had just come over from Denmark and won all hearts.

The accident happened by my falling into the fireplace, when my nurse left me for a minute. To raise myself up I caught hold of the bar of the grate with my left hand, and scorched the inside out. It is still shrivelled, though fifty-five years have passed since that awful day for my mother, when she found her only son, as she thought, crippled for life.

But though it chapped terribly every winter, and would not open properly for the next three or four years, I soon got back the use of my hand, and no one now suspects it of being the least disfigured till I hold it open to show them. The back was uninjured, and it looks a very nice hand by X-rays, when only the bones are visible.

The doctor recommended that, being a child of a very active brain (I asked quite awkward questions about the birth of my brother shortly afterwards), I should be taught to read while I was kept in bed, as the only means of keeping my hand out of danger, and I was given a box of letters which I always arranged upon the splint of my wounded hand. By the time that it was well I could read, and on my fifth birthday I was given the leather-bound Prayer-book which I had been promised whenever I could read every word in it. I have the Prayer-book still, half a century later.

Poor Miss Brinsmead had a hopeless task, for though I could learn to read so easily, I never could learn to play on the piano with both hands at the same time, except in the very baldest melodies, like “God Save the Queen,” and the “Sultan’s Polka.” These I did achieve.

In 1864 I was sent to a dame’s school in Kensington Square, kept by the Misses Newman, from which I was shortly afterwards transferred to another kept by Miss Daymond, an excellent teacher, where I had Johnny and Everett Millais, and sons of other great artists, for my schoolfellows.

In 1866, though it nearly broke my mother’s heart, I was sent to my first boarding-school, Temple Grove, East Sheen—in the old house where Dorothy Temple had lived, and Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, the greatest of that illustrious race, was born—the school, moreover, which had numbered Benjamin Disraeli among its pupils. How many people are there who know that Dizzy was schooled in the house in which Palmerston was born—those two great apostles of British prestige?

Here I stayed for three years before I won the first junior scholarship at Cheltenham College, and here, from my house-master, I had a fresh and wonderful department of knowledge opened to me, for he used to take me naturalising (both by day and by night, when the other boys were in bed) on Sheen Common, then wild enough to have snakes and glow-worms and lizards, as well as newts and leeches, and rich in insect prizes. I won this favour because he accidentally discovered that I knew “Mangnall’s Questions” and “Common Subjects” by heart. But though he was Divinity Master, he never discovered that I knew my Bible quite as well.

He also taught me to lie. I had never told a lie till I went to Temple Grove. But as he prided himself on his acuteness, he was constitutionally unable to believe the truth. It was too obvious for him. When I found that he invariably thought I was lying while I still obeyed my mother’s teaching, and was too afraid of God to tell a lie, I suddenly made up my mind that I would humour him, and tell whatever lie was necessary to this transparent Sherlock Holmes. After this he always believed me, unless I accidentally forgot and told him the truth. And I liked him so much that I wished him to believe me.

He did not injure my character as much as he might have done, because I was born with a loathing for insincerity. The difficulty came when he and Waterfield, the head master, questioned me about the same thing, for Waterfield mesmerised one into telling the truth, and he tempted one to tell a lie. It reminds me now of Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love.”

At Temple Grove I acquired my taste for games and taste for natural history.

In 1868, my mother, to whom I was passionately attached, died. I used to dream that she was alive for months afterwards. And the great theosophist to whom I mentioned this sees in it an astral communication. To divert my thoughts from this, the greatest grief I had ever had, I was sent to stay with my cousin, Colonel Joseph Sladen, who had already succeeded to Ripple Court, and was then a Gunner Captain, stationed at Sheerness. He belonged to the Royal Yacht Squadron, and had a schooner yacht in which we used to go away for cruises up the Channel. I was a little boy of twelve, and his two eldest sons, Arthur Sladen, now H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught’s Private Secretary in Canada, and Sampson Sladen, now the Chief of the London Fire Brigade, were hardly more than babies, but I enjoyed it very much, because I was interested in the yachting and in the firing of the hundred-pounder Armstrongs, which were the monster guns of those days. We went in my cousin’s yacht to see the new ironclad fleets of Great Britain and France, and we went over the Black Prince and the Minotaur, the crack ships of the time.

A year after that, exactly on the first anniversary of my mother’s death, I went to Cheltenham College, where I had taken a scholarship. I was at Cheltenham College six years, and took four scholarships and many prizes at the school, the most interesting of which, in view of my after life, was the prize for the English Poem. I was also Senior Prefect, Editor of the school magazine, Captain of Football, and Captain of the Rifle Corps. I shot for the school four times in the Public School competitions at Wimbledon, and in 1874 won the Spencer Cup, which was open to the best shot from each of the Public Schools. I was the school representative for it also in 1873.

At Cheltenham, I suppose, I laid the foundations of my literary career, because, besides editing the school magazine for a couple of years, and writing the Prize Poem, I read every book in the College library. It was such a delight to me to have the run of a well-stocked library. The books at home were nearly all religious books. I was brought up on the sternest low-Church lines; we went to church twice a day on Sunday, besides having prayers read twice at home, and hymns sung in the afternoon. The church we attended was St. Paul’s, Onslow Square, where I had to listen to hour-long sermons from Capel Molyneux and Prebendary Webb-Peploe. The dull and long services were almost intolerable, except when Millais, the great painter, who had the next pew, asked me into his pew to relieve the crush in ours. Millais sat so upright and so forward when he was listening that my father could not see me, and I used to bury my face in the beautiful Mrs. Millais’ sealskin jacket; I had such an admiration for her that I did not go to sleep. Millais—he was not Sir John in those days—did not make his children go to church; I suppose he went because he was fascinated by the eloquence of the sermons. Molyneux, Marston and Peploe were all great preachers, though they bored an unfortunate small boy to the verge of nervous prostration. We were only allowed to read Sunday books on Sunday, and the newspapers were put away, as they were to the day of my father’s death in 1910.

After my mother’s death I always longed to get back to school, because, though we had to go to chapel every day, and twice on Sunday, there was not that atmosphere of religion which made me, as a small boy, begin to feel unhappy about lunch-time on Saturday, and not thoroughly relieved till after breakfast on Monday. I hated Sunday at home; the two-mile walk to and from church was the best part of it.

I have forgotten two other preparations for a literary career which I perpetrated at Cheltenham. I and my greatest friend, a boy called Walter Roper Lawrence (now Sir W. R. Lawrence, Bart., G.C.I.E.), who afterwards rose to a position of the highest eminence in India, wrote verses for the school magazine, and I published a pamphlet to avenge a contemptuous reference, in the Shotover Papers, and was duly summoned for libel. The late Frederick Stroud, the Recorder of Tewkesbury, who was at that time a solicitor, got me off. I never saw him in after life, which I much regretted, because he was, like myself, a great student of everything connected with Adam Lindsay Gordon, the Australian poet. He died while I was writing our life of Gordon.

At the beginning of 1875 I won an open classical scholarship at Trinity College, Oxford, where I commenced residence in the following October. At Oxford again I read voraciously in the splendid library of the Union.

There my love of games continued unabated. I shot against Cambridge four years, and won all the shooting challenge-cups. I also played in the ’Varsity Rugby Union Football XV when I first went up.

I had delightful old panelled rooms on Number 7 staircase—a chance fact, which won me a great honour and pleasure. One afternoon, when I came in from playing football, the College messenger met me, saying, “Grand company in your rooms this afternoon, Mr. Sladen—the President, and all the Fellows, and Cardinal Nooman,” and he added, “When the President looked at your mantelpiece, sir, he corfed.” My mantelpiece was strewn with portraits of Maud Branscombe, Eveleen Rayne, Mrs. Rousby, and other theatrical stars of that day—about a couple of dozen of them.

Shortly afterwards the President’s butler arrived with a note, which I supposed was to reproach me with the racy appearance of my mantelpiece, but it was to ask me to spend the evening with the President, because Cardinal Newman had expressed a desire to meet the present occupant of his rooms.

The Cardinal, a wan little man with a shrivelled face and a large nose, and one of the most beautiful expressions which ever appeared on a human being, talked to me for a couple of hours, prostrating me with his exquisite modesty. He wanted to know if the snapdragons, to which he had written a poem, still grew on the wall between Trinity and Balliol; he wanted to compare undergraduate life of his day with the undergraduate life of mine; he asked me about a number of Gothic fragments in Oxford which might have perished between his day and mine, and fortunately, I had already conceived the passion for Gothic architecture which pervades my books, and was able to tell him about every one. He told me the marks by which he knew that those were his rooms; he asked me about my studies, and hobbies, and aims in life; I don’t think that I have ever felt any honour of the kind so much.

At Oxford I spent every penny I could afford, and more, on collecting a library of standard works, and I have many of them still. I remember that the literary Oxonians of that day discussed poetry much more than prose, and could mostly be classified into admirers of William Morris and admirers of Swinburne, and I think the Morrisians were more numerous. All of them had an academic admiration for Matthew Arnold’s poems, and could spout from “Thyrsis” and the “Scholar Gipsy,” which was compared with Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Thackeray’s daughter (Lady Ritchie) was at that time the latest star in fiction, as I occasionally remind her.

I had the good fortune to know some of the greatest of the authors who lived at Oxford when I was an undergraduate—Max Müller, Bishop Stubbs the historian, Edward Augustus Freeman, Lewis Carroll, Dean Kitchin, Canon Bright and W. L. Courtney.

Oxford in those days (as I suppose it does still) revolved largely round “Bobby Raper,” then Dean of Trinity, a man of infinite tact and kindness, swift to discern ability and character in an undergraduate, and to make a friend of their owner, and blessed with a most saving sense of humour. When they had finished at Oxford, a word from him found them coveted masterships, or secretaryships to Public Men. He was the link between Oxford and Public life, as much as Jowett—the “Jowler” himself—who sat in John Wycliffe’s seat at Balliol. Lord Milner, St. John Brodrick and George Curzon have gone farthest of the Balliol men of my time. Asquith was before me, Edward Grey after. Trinity ran to Bishops. Most of the men who sat at the scholars’ table at Trinity in my time who went into Holy Orders are Bishops now, Archie Robertson, now Bishop of Exeter, being the senior of them, Bishop Gore of Oxford, who had rooms on the same floor as I had, and was one of my greatest friends in my first year, was the Junior Fellow. He was a very well-off young man, and used to spend huge sums on buying folios of the Latin Fathers, and then learn them by heart. There is no one who knows so much about the Fathers as the Bishop of Oxford. The present Archbishop of Canterbury was at Trinity, but before my time, and so was Father Stanton, who went there because he came of a hunting family, and it was a hunting College, and he was a Rugby man. Bishop Stubbs and Freeman were also Trinity men, and generally at the College Gaudies, where the Scholars used to dine at the same table as the Dons and their guests. Sir Richard Burton came once to a Gaudy when I was there, and told me that he was very surprised that they had asked him, because he had been sent down.

I said, “You are in very good company. The great Lord Chatham and Walter Savage Landor were sent down from Trinity as well as you.”

But one well-known literary man of the present day holds the record over them all, because he was sent down from Trinity twice.

Although I was a classical scholar, I refused to go in for Classics in the Final Schools. “Greats,” otherwise Literæ Humaniores, as this school is called at Oxford, embraces the study of Philosophy in the original Greek and Latin of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, and Philosophy and Logic generally. I was sick of the Classics, and I never could take the smallest interest in Philosophy, so I knew that I should do no good in this school, and announced my intention of going in for the School of Modern History. This was too revolutionary for my tutor. He said—

“Classical scholars are expected to go in for Greats, and if you fail to do so, we shall have to consider the taking away of your scholarship.”

I was astute in my generation; I went to Gore (the Bishop), who was my friend, and always met undergraduates as if he were one of themselves, and said to him, “Will you do something for me, Gore?”

“It depends on what it is,” he replied, with his curious smile.

“Tell the Common-room (i. e. the Dons, who used to meet in the Common-room every night after dinner) that I really mean to go in for History whether they take away my scholarship or not, but that if they do take it away, I shall take my name off the books of Trinity and go and ask Jowett if he will admit me at Balliol. You were a Balliol undergrad; you know the kind of answer that Jowett would make to a man who was willing to give up an eighty pounds a year scholarship in order to go in for the School which interested him.”

“Jowett will take you,” he said, “but I will see what can be done here.”

That night I received the most unpleasant note an undergraduate can receive—a command to meet the Common-room at ten o’clock the next morning. They were all present when I went in. The President invited me to take a seat, and my tutor (the Rev. H. G. Woods, now Master of the Temple, of whom I still see something) said—

“Are you quite determined to go in for the School of History, Mr. Sladen?”

“Quite,” I replied.

“Then we hope that the degree you take will justify us in assenting to such a very unusual procedure.”

Then they all smiled very pleasantly, and I thanked them and went out.

They must have felt quite justified when, two years afterwards, I took my First in History with congratulatory letters from all my examiners, while all the scholars of Trinity who went in for the School of Literæ Humaniores took Seconds and Thirds. I should have got a Fourth, I am convinced.

Again I read voraciously. For the first year I hardly bothered about my text-books at all. I read biographies, books about architecture and art and literature, historical novels, the writings of historical personages, everything which threw brilliant sidelights on my subject. And in the second year I learnt my text-books almost by heart, except Stubbs’s Constitutional History and Selected Charters. I simply could not memorise them—they were so dry, and I hated the dry bones of Constitutional History almost as badly as philosophy. I learned digests of them, which took less time, and were no dryer, and proved equally efficacious in answering the papers.

In after years, when I was entertaining Bishop Stubbs at a reception, which Montague Fowler and I gave in honour of Mark Twain at the Authors’ Club, he roared with laughter when I told him that I got a First in History without reading his books, by learning the Digests of them by heart.

He said, “I know they are dreadfully dull. Did you find my lectures very dull when you came to them?” He had not forgotten that I had attended his lectures for a couple of years.

I said, “No, not at all.”

“Honestly, did you get any good from them?”

“Quite honestly?”

He nodded.

I said, “Not in the usual way.”

“Well,” he asked, “how did you get any good from them?”

“You must forgive me if I tell you.”

“Tell me; it cannot be worse than what you said about my books.”

“Well,” I confessed, “the reason why I attended your lectures was that you never bothered as to whether I was there or not, and I hardly ever was there. I did not think any lectures were any good, but my tutor made me attend sixteen a week, and the time which I was supposed to spend at your lectures, I used to spend in my rooms reading. You were the only gentleman among my lecturers—all the rest used to call the names, and report me to my tutor if I was absent.”

He was immensely tickled, and said, “You deserved to get a First, if you took things as seriously as that.”

But Bishop Stubbs was very human. He always read the lightest novel he could lay hands on before he went to bed, to relieve his mind after working, and save him from insomnia.

“They are so light,” he said, “that I keep other books in front of them in my book-case.”

As an author, I have found the education I was given and gave myself a very useful foundation. Those ten years I gave to the study of Latin and Greek and classical history and mythology were not thrown away, because I have written so many books about Italy and Sicily and Egypt, in which having the classics at my fingers’ ends made me understand the history, and the allusions in the materials I had to digest. It is impossible to write freely about Italy and Greece unless you know your classics.

The two years of incessant study which I gave to taking my degree in Modern History at Oxford have been equally useful, because it is impossible to write guide-books and books of travel unless you have a sound knowledge of history.

For a brief while my degree in history had a most practical and technical value, for it won me the Chair of Modern History in the University of Sydney, New South Wales.

Beyond a week or two in Paris, I had never left England before I went to Australia in the end of 1879, a few months after I left Oxford, but I knew my England pretty well, because my father had always encouraged me to see the parts of England which contained the finest scenery and the architectural chefs d’œuvres, like cathedrals. Ireland I had never visited, and of Scotland I only knew Dumfriesshire, where my father rented a shooting-box and a moor for four years; and where I had enjoyed splendid rough shooting when I was a boy, in the very heart of the land of Burns. “The Grey Mare’s Tail” was on one shooting which we had, and the Carlyle cottage was right under our Craigenputtock shooting.

When I left Oxford my father gave me three hundred pounds to spend on a year of travel, and I chose to go to Australia to stay with his eldest brother, Sir Charles Sladen, K.C.M.G., who had been Prime Minister of the Colony of Victoria, and was at that time leader of the Upper House, and of the Constitutional Party in Victoria. I wanted to see if I should like to settle in the Colonies, and go to the Bar with a view to a political career. We were not rich enough for me to think of the House of Commons seriously, and I have always taken a very keen interest in politics.

Further, I wanted to go and stay on my uncle’s station to get some riding and shooting, and to see something of the outdoor life of Australia, of which I had heard so much. And I wanted desperately to try living in a hot country. I knew by intuition that I should like heat.

I had not been staying with my uncle for a year before I had made up my mind to live in Australia, a conclusion to which I was assisted by my marriage with Miss Margaret Isabel Muirhead, the daughter of a Scotsman from Stirling, who had owned a fine station called the Grampians in the Western District of Victoria, and had been killed in a horse accident. As I had not been called to the Bar before I left home, I found that I had to go through a two years’ course, and take a law degree at the Melbourne University. This I did, though the position was sufficiently anomalous. For instance, I had to attend lectures by a Member of the Government, the Solicitor-General. I knew him intimately at the Melbourne Club and in private life, and we generally used to walk down to the Club after the lecture. Sometimes we went into a pub, to have a drink together, and we discussed anything from the forthcoming Government Bills to Club stories. He told me one day, before the public knew anything about it, of the intention of the Government to bring in a Bill to make sweeps on racing illegal. As much as forty-five thousand pounds had been subscribed for the Melbourne Cup Sweep the year before.

I said, “It is no good making them illegal; it only means that they will be carried on under the rose, and that a whole lot of the sweeps will be bogus. You can’t stop sweeps; all you can do is to put the bogus sweep on a level with Jimmy Miller’s.”

“What would you do, then?” he asked.

“Well, if you really want to stop them, you should legalise them, and put a twenty-five per cent., or fifty per cent. for the matter of that, tax upon them. You’d spoil the odds so that sweeps would die a natural death; and if they didn’t, you’d get a nice lot of money to save the taxpayer’s pocket. You would be like the Prince of Monaco, who lives by the gambling at Monte Carlo.”

He duly put the suggestion before the Government, but they thought that this would be paltering with eternal sin, and passed their Bill to help the bogus-sweep promoter.

This same man and I were asked one night to take part in a Shakespeare reading at the Prime Minister’s. My friend was late, and the Prime Minister, who was not a discreet man, began talking about him. Somebody remarked what a wonderfully well-informed man he was.

“Yes,” said the Prime Minister, “my Solicitor-General is one of those people who know nothing about everything. And the way he does it is that he never opens a book; he just reads what the magazines and papers have to say about books.”

Suddenly the Premier felt that his remarks were no longer being received with enthusiasm, and looking up, saw his Solicitor-General waiting to shake hands with him.

At the Melbourne University I formed one intimate friendship, which has lasted ever since. Among my fellow-students was Dr. George Ernest Morrison, the famous Times correspondent of Peking. He was famous in those days as the finest football player in the Colony, and he began his adventures while he was at the University. For months we missed him; nobody knew where he was—or if his father, who was head master of Geelong College, did know, he never told. Then suddenly he turned up again, and said that he had been walking from Cape York, which was the northernmost point of Australia, to Melbourne. He had undertaken—and I don’t think he had any bet on it—to make his way from Cape York to Melbourne, alone, unarmed and without a penny in his pocket. In the northernmost part of his journey, at any rate, there were a great many wild blacks, and many rivers full of crocodiles to swim. But there are, of course, no large carnivora in Australia, and a snake can be killed with a stick. When he was swimming a river he used to construct a raft, and put his clothes and his pack on it; he carried a pack like any other sun-downer, and when he got to a station, did his bit of work to pay for his bed and supper, and when he left it, if the next station south was more than a day’s journey, he was given enough food to carry him through. This is, of course, the universal custom in Australia when a man is going from station to station in search of work, such as shearing.

He had not a single misadventure. The reason why he took so long was that his way from station to station naturally took him out of the direct line to the south, and he made a stay at some of them. The newspapers were so impressed with his feat that, shortly afterwards, when the Age organised an expedition to explore New Guinea, he was given command of it. That was the last I saw of Morrison till we met a few years afterwards at my house in London.

I never practised for the Melbourne Bar, for no sooner had I taken my law degree than I was appointed to the vacant chair of Modern History in the University of Sydney.

I had, since I landed in Australia, made my debut as an author, and had already published two volumes of verse, Frithjof and Ingebjorg and Australian Lyrics. During the year that I held my chair, we had apartments in the Old Government House, Parramatta, which had become a boarding-house, and spent our vacations on the Hawkesbury and in the Blue Mountains.

While I was at Parramatta I published a third volume of verse, A Poetry of Exiles.

Then occurred an event which deprived me of one of my principal reasons for remaining in Australia, the premature death of my uncle. This closed my short cut to a political career; and I had long since come to the conclusion that Australia was not the place for a literary career, because there was no real publishing in Australia. Publishers were merely booksellers, who acted as intermediaries between authors and printers; they took no risks of publication; the author paid, and they received one commission as publishers and another as booksellers. This did not signify much for verse; the printing bill for books of verse is not large, and poets are accustomed to bringing out their works at their own risk in other countries besides Australia. But a large prose work of a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand words is, at Australian prices, extremely expensive to produce, and when it is produced, has only a small sale because it does not bear the name of any well-known English publishing house.

So I suddenly made up my mind to return to England.

The five years I spent in Australia were fruitful for my career as an author, though I have never published anything about Australia, except my own verses, and anthologies of Australian verse, and a life, and an edition of the poems, of Adam Lindsay Gordon. The last was phenomenally successful; I am sure that no volume of Browning has ever sold so well. And one of the anthologies had a sale of twenty thousand copies in the first ten years of its existence.

Australia supplied exactly the right element for my development. At Cheltenham I was the most prominent boy of my time, and the prestige with which I came up from school gave me a certain momentum at Oxford. So I went out to Australia with a very good opinion of Public Schools, and Oxford, and myself.

I soon discovered that nothing was of any importance in Australia except sport and money. If Tennyson or Walter Scott had gone to a bush-township, he would have been judged merely by his proficiency or absence of proficiency as a groom. Horsemanship is the one test of the inhabitants of a bush-township.

In Melbourne and Sydney and on “stations” it was different. Hospitality was prodigal, and there was a disposition to regard with charity one’s shortcomings from the Colonial point of view, and to accept with sympathy the fact that one had distinguished oneself elsewhere. The Australian man is very manly, and very hearty; the Australian woman is apt to be very pretty, and to have a strong personality—to be full of character as a lover.

The climate of Australia I found absolutely delightful. It is a land of eternal summer: its winters are only cooler summers. The unchanging blue of its skies is appalling to those whose prosperity depends on the rainfall.

When I went out to Australia, just after leaving Oxford, I was enough of a prig to profit very greatly by being suddenly thrown into an absolutely democratic community. I was saved from finding things difficult by the fact that I was born a Bohemian, in spite of my very conventional parentage, and really did delight in roughing it. The free and easy Colonial life was a great relief to me after the prim life in my English home; and staying about on the great stations in the western district of Victoria, which belonged to various connections of my family, furnished the finest experience of my early life. I spent most of my first year in Australia in that way, returning, in between, to pay visits to my uncle at Geelong. Being in the saddle every day never lost its thrill for me, because I had hardly ever been on a horse before I went to Australia; and wandering about the big paddocks and the adjoining stretches of forest, gun in hand—I hardly ever went out without a gun—had something of the excitement of the books about the American backwoods which I read in my boyhood. It is true that I would rather have shot grizzly bears than the native bears of Australia, mere sloths, and lions and tigers than kangaroos, but a big “forester” is not to be sneezed at, and Australia has an extraordinary wealth of strange birds—the cockatoos and parrots and parakeets alone give a sort of tropical aspect to the forest, and the snakes give an unpleasantly tropical aspect, though, fortunately, in Australia, they shrink from human habitations.

When I married I went to live in Melbourne, close to public gardens of extraordinary beauty and almost tropical luxuriance, and soon became absorbed in the maelstrom of dancing and playing tennis, and watching first-class cricket and racing.

When we went to Parramatta it was easy to make excursions to the marvellous gorges of the Blue Mountains, which are among the grandest valley scenery in the world.

Everything was large, and free, and sparsely inhabited—most expanding to the mind, and the glimpse of the tropical glories of Oriental Ceylon, which I enjoyed for four days on my voyage home, made me hear the “East a callin’” for ever afterwards.

I found London desperately dull when we returned to it in 1884. I had no literary friends, except at Oxford, where we took a house for three months to get some colour into life again. It was on the banks of the Cherwell, facing the most beautiful buildings of Magdalen, and the Gothic glories of Oxford were manna to my hungry soul.

The summer, spent in Devonshire and Cornwall and Scotland, was well enough, and in the winter, which we spent at Torquay, we had grand scenery and beautiful ancient buildings, but the climate seemed treacherous and cold after the fierce bright summers of Australia.

I must not forget that I came very near not going to Australia at all. I felt the parting with my father extremely, and he was quite prostrated by it. I had, a few days before starting, been introduced to the captain of the old Orient liner Lusitania, in which I made the voyage—a hard, reckless sea-dog—and he did me good service on that occasion. Two letters came on board for me when we put in at Plymouth to pick up the last mails and passengers. One of these letters contained a letter from my father to the effect that if I wished to give up the passage and return home I might do so. The captain, for some reason or other, whether from having had a conversation with my father, or what, suspected that the letter might have some message of that kind—he may have had the same thing occurring in his experience before—so he did not give me the letter till the next day, when I had no possible chance of communicating with England until I got to the Cape de Verde Islands. By that time, of course, I had thoroughly settled down to the enjoyments of the voyage, and looked at the matter in a different light.

CHAPTER II
MY LIFE (1886-1888)

About this time I was struck with the idea that for a person who intended to make his living by writing books, Travel was a necessity, and while one had no ties, it cost no more to live in various parts of the Continent than to live in London.

The desire materialised sooner than it might have done, because Arthur Chamberlain, whom we had met when we were sharing a house in Scotland with the Wilkies (wife and daughters of the famous Melbourne doctor), wrote letters, which would brook no refusal, for us to come and join him at Heidelberg, where he was now a student, for the Quincentenary of the Heidelberg University.

Before we went abroad we had a foretaste of the many pilgrimages to archæological paradises which we were to make. We spent six weeks at Canterbury, peculiarly delightful to me, because my family have been landowners in East Kent from time immemorial, which made the neighbourhood of Canterbury full of landmarks for me, and Canterbury is, after Oxford, fuller of the Middle Ages than any town in England. Here, having the run of the Cathedral library given me by its curator, Dr. Shepherd (I hope I have spelt his name right), I commenced my studies of Edward, the Black Prince—the local hero, who lies buried in the Cathedral. This led to my writing the most ambitious of my poems, “Edward, the Black Prince.” I wrote it among the ruins of the old Cathedral Monastery at Canterbury, and the first edition was printed in the Piazza of Santa Croce at Florence.

At Heidelberg, living for economy in a delightful pension kept by Miss Abraham, who had been the Kaiser’s English governess, we met the set who pass their years in wandering from one pension to another on the Continent. Our immediate future was marked out for us. One family booked us for a favourite pension at Zurich, another for Lucerne, another for Lugano, another for Florence, another for Rome, another for Castellamare di-Stabia below Pompeii.

And so we began the great trek. We summered at Heidelberg. Autumn in Switzerland was perfectly beautiful, but the two or three months which we spent in Florence formed one of the turning-points of my life. It was there that we found a pension, which called itself an hotel, replete with the atmosphere and charm and the little luxuries which Italy knows so well how to give for seven francs a day. There we met people who came to Florence year after year, and knew every picture, almost every stone, in it—almost every ounce of pleasure which was to be got out of it. They initiated us, in fact, into Florence, which was more of an education than anything in the world.

Florence is Renaissance in architecture, Gothic in feeling. Its inhabitants, native and foreign, live in the past. It was here that I, born with a passion for realising the Middle Ages, acquired the undying desires which have taken me back so often and for such long periods, and have inspired me to write so many books about Italy and Sicily. From the very beginning I plunged into the life of Florence and the study of things Italian with extraordinary zest.

Going on to Rome for a month or two inspired me with the same feeling for the classics as Florence had inspired in me for the Middle Ages.

I own that, when I was persuaded to go on from Rome to Castellamare, I did so with certain misgivings. There did not seem to be the same chances in it. We were going to a villa outside the town, whose sole attraction seemed to be that it was six miles from Pompeii.

But when we got there, it had a profound influence on our lives. It proved to be the villa where the Countess of Blessington had entertained Byron and others of the immortals, a beautiful southern house, standing on the green hill which buries in its bosom the ashes of Vesuvius, and the ruins of Stabiæ, a city which shared the fate of Pompeii. It had a vineyard round it; its quaint garden was overrun with sleepy lizards, which you never catch asleep—the lizards in which the genius of Italy seems to live.

We saw the sunset every night on the Bay of Naples and Ischia, which all the world was talking about then because of the earthquake which had lately ravished it. Every night we saw a tree of fire rising from Vesuvius.

We used to spend our days in the orange groves of Sorrento, or driving in donkey-carts to Pompeii, that city of the resurrection of the ancient world. The weather was somnolently mild; for the first time we were eating of the fruit of the lotus, which we have eaten so often since, and which has pervaded my writings.

If Castellamare had only done that for us, it would be a milestone in my life, but it also planted the seeds of unrest—die Wanderlust—in my veins. Some one we met there—I don’t remember who it was now—had a craze for Greek ruins; Roman ruins meant nothing to him, he said; there were only two places for him, Athens and Sicily.

In Sicily it was Girgenti which won his heart, not Syracuse or Taormina, and he almost persuaded us to go there. He obviously preferred it, even to Athens. But the name meant nothing to me; I had read of Agrigentum in the classics, and he showed me photographs of the glorious Greek temples, which are still preserved in the environs of modern Girgenti. Athens, on the contrary, had been before my mind ever since I was a boy. The literature of Greece is, with the exception of Homer and Theocritus, roughly speaking, the literature of Athens. I knew most of its principal buildings almost as well as if I had seen them. I heard the call of Athens, and to Athens we went from Castellamare.

Going there showed how comparatively cheap and easy it is to get to distant places. We went through Taranto—Tarentum—to Brindisi; from Brindisi to Corfu, in the Ionian Islands, the earthly paradise of the fair Nausicaa, and the empresses of to-day; from Corfu to Patras and Corinth; from Corinth to Athens.

The moral effect began before ever we reached Athens; it was so vivifying to a student of the classics to pass Tarentum, and Cæsar’s Brundusium, the Lesbos of Sappho, the Ithaca of Ulysses, Corinth and the Piræus.

Lesbos! Corinth! Athens! Sappho! Ulysses! there was romance and undying poetry in the very names.

The Greece of those days really was something out of the beaten track. There were only two little railways of a few miles each, and there was not an hotel worthy of the name anywhere outside of Athens. Even in Athens, if you were not at a first-class hotel, kid’s flesh, and sheep’s-milk butter, black bread and honey of Hymettus, and wine which was full of resin, were the staples of diet. But what did it matter? We lived in a house and a street with beautiful classical names—we lived in the house of Hermes. And when we climbed up to the Acropolis at sunset, we were in an enchanted land midway between earth and heaven, for we were in the very heart of history surrounded by milk-white columns of the marble of Pentelicus, and facing a rich curtain of sunset, which hung over Ægina, and trailed into the waters of the Bay of Salamis. Athens is gloriously romantic and beautiful, and Time has laid its lightest fingers on her rocks and ruins, whose names are the commonplaces of Greek history.

We spent some glorious weeks at Athens, made interesting by the acquaintance of Tricoupis, the famous Prime Minister, and the presence of the President of my college at Oxford—now Bishop of Hereford, from whom I heard only the other day. From Athens Miss Lorimer’s unappeasable hunger to see the world swept us on, after several happy weeks, to Constantinople—the outpost of the East in Europe. Constantinople was one of the most delightful experiences of my life. There is no call which I hear like the call of the East, and in Constantinople you have the noblest mosques west of India, and bazaars almost as barbarous as the bazaars of North Africa, thronged, like the broad bridge of boats which crosses the Golden Horn, with the mixed races of the Levant, in their gay, uncouth costumes. The scene, too, is one of rare beauty, for the great mosques are rooted in dark cypress-groves, and rear their domes and minarets on the horizon, and the calm waters of the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmora are dotted with fantastic caïques.

We spent all too short a time there, dipping into the bowl of Oriental mystery, in perfect April weather, when we were called home to meet a sister-in-law coming from Australia.

I had, in the interval, published two more volumes of verse, A Summer Christmas and In Cornwall and Across the Sea, and I had printed at Florence Edward, the Black Prince, begun during that long visit to Canterbury in the spring of 1886, during which I steeped myself deeper and deeper in the study of Gothic architecture, not yet realising what an important part it was to play in my writing.

When we returned from Constantinople I had The Black Prince properly published in England, and though its sales were trifling, like those of A Summer Christmas, it met with warm commendation from the critics.

Shortly after this we were inspired with the desire to visit the United States in the autumn of 1888, and as we were going so far, we determined so stay in one place while we were in England.

The place we chose was Richmond. I had always loved it since I was a little boy at Temple Grove School in the neighbouring village of East Sheen. It was sufficiently in the country for us to pass a spring and summer there without irksomeness, and sufficiently beautiful and old-fashioned to satisfy my cravings.

At Richmond we took a house in the Queen’s Road, and but for the very large sum demanded for fixtures, we should have abandoned our American trip, and taken the part of the Old Palace which has now been restored at great expense by Mr. J. L. Middleton, for which I had a great inclination. Mr. Middleton is a friend of mine and I have been over it many times with him. It stands right opposite my study window. We liked Richmond as much then as we do now, except for the long trail up from the railway station to the Queen’s Road when we went to the theatre. We were in the Park or on the adjoining commons every day, watching the operations of Nature from the growth to the fall.

It was a busy time, for I wrote The Spanish Armada on the occasion of the Tercentenary of the immortal sea-fight, and I edited two anthologies of Australian verse, Australian Ballads and A Century of Australian Song, for Walter Scott, Ltd. The pleasure of compiling these two anthologies, the first books by which I ever made any money, was enhanced because I did them at the unsolicited invitation of the late William Sharp, the poet and author of the rhapsodies of “Fiona Macleod,” who afterwards became a dear and intimate friend. He introduced me to Charles Mackay, the editor of the famous Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry, who adopted Marie Corelli as his daughter, and was father of Eric Mackay. It was through him that I received the invitation to do the Australian part of the Slang Dictionary, edited by M. Barrére, the French Ambassador’s brother, for which also I received some money.

These encouragements made me ask my friend, the late S. H. Jeyes, who went to Trinity, Oxford, on the same day as I did, and was at the time one of the editors of the St James’s Gazette, from which he afterwards changed to the Standard, whether he thought that I ought to go to America, or stay and pursue my chances in England.

He said, “Go; in America they will take you at your own valuation, and when you get back, it will be your valuation.”

And so it came that we took our passages in the old Cunarder Catalonia from Liverpool to Boston.

CHAPTER III
I GO TO THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

The only literary at-homes I had been to before I went to America were Edmund Gosse’s in Delamere Terrace, Louise Chandler Moulton’s in Weymouth Street, and W. E. Henley’s in an old house in which he resided at Chiswick.

I have written elsewhere how the Gosses used to receive their friends on Sunday afternoons. Not many came, but those who did come were generally famous in the world of letters.

Mrs. Moulton, on the other hand, often had a crowd at her receptions. It was in her drawing-room that I first met Sir Frederick Wedmore, Mrs. Alexander the novelist, and Coulson Kernahan, and Theodore Watts. She herself was a charming poet, and liked entertaining poets. I met her first at Sir Bruce and Lady Seton’s, at Durham House, which at that time contained the finest collection of modern paintings in London.

THE AUTHOR
Drawn by Yoshio Markino

It was fortunate that Henley’s friends were devoted to him, because he was an invalid and could not get about. He was already a great power in journalism. His paper, called at first The Scots Observer, and later on The National Observer, had taken the place of the Saturday Review, which was not at that time conducted with the ability of the old Saturday. The men who gathered round him were very brilliant. I forget what evening of the week it was that he was at home, but whatever evening it was he kept it up very late, with much smoke and consumption of whiskey; and the conversation was always worth listening to. Henley was a magnificent talker, with a fund of curious knowledge, and he had a knack of turning the conversation on to some strange kind of sin or some strange kind of occultism, which was thoroughly threshed out by the clever people present. He rather liked morbid subjects.

Edmund Gosse gave me introductions to H. O. Houghton, head of the publishing firm of Houghton, Mifflin & Co., and he and Henley and Katherine Tynan gave me introductions to various authors. But my most useful introduction I had through my chief American friend of that time, Ada Loftus, who made the London correspondents of the New York Herald and the Boston Globe give full-length announcements of my approaching visit to America—as long as they would give to William Watson now. They labelled me in those announcements the “Australian Poet,” and that label stuck to me during the whole of that visit to the United States. They asked Mrs. Loftus, I suppose, what I had done, and she told them that I had written several volumes of verse about Australia. Be that as it may, those friendly announcements resulted in so many hospitalities being offered to us by American authors and literary clubs that we really did not need our introductions, especially in Boston, where Mrs. Moulton was waiting to welcome us, and where I had old schoolfellows—the Peabodys—connected with most of the leading families.

But I did present the introduction to Mr. Houghton—when does an author neglect an introduction to a publisher?—and he showed us innumerable kindnesses all the time we remained in Boston. It was to him that I owed the invitations from Oliver Wendell Holmes and Whittier, and Longfellow’s family to visit them in their homes—inestimable opportunities. We spent three months in Boston, seeing all the best of Boston literary society and the University bigwigs at Harvard, and then we went for a month to New York until it was time for the ice-carnival season at Montreal. At New York, with Edmund Clarence Stedman, the first of American critics, as a godfather, the hospitalities of Boston were repeated to us. But this was not our principal visit to New York.

Our first trip to Canada was intensely interesting to us, because there we were in a new world, where the temperature was below zero, and the snow several feet high in the streets, and the ice several feet thick on the great river, up which ocean liners come from spring to autumn. The ice-palace was already built, and rose like a mediæval castle of alabaster; in the centre of the city the habitants were selling their milk in frozen lumps in the market; all the world wore furs, for the poorest could buy a skin of some sort made up somehow. There were still buffalo-skin coats in those days in plenty, at three pounds apiece, and those who could not afford a fur cap to their liking, wore a woollen tobogganing tuque, which could be drawn down over the forehead and the ears, just as some of the younger women and the children wore their blanket tobogganing coats.

It was a new world, where nobody skated in the open, because of the impossibility of keeping the ice free from snow, and where skating was so universal an accomplishment that in the rinks people danced on skates as naturally as on their feet in a ballroom.

One soon took for granted the monstrous cold, learned to swathe in furs every time one left the house, even if it was only to go to the post, to wear thin boots, because they were always covered with “arctics” when one went out, and thin underclothing because one’s furs were so thick out of doors, and the houses so furiously hot indoors; to have double windows always closed, and hot air flowing into the room till the temperature reached 70° and over.

It is no wonder that ice-cream, as they call it, is a feature at dinner in winter in a Canadian hotel.

Outside, all the land was white, and all the sky was blue. Wrapped up in furs, people so despised the intense cold that there was not one closed sleigh—at Montreal in winter all the cabs were sleighs. By day we sleighed up the mountain for tobogganing and came back in time for tea-parties; by night we sleighed to dances or picnics. The merry jingle of sleigh-bells was never out of one’s ears; and everything was so delightfully simple—it was always beer and not champagne—and every one took an interest in Australia and Colonial poetry. The tea-parties were generally impromptus got up on the telephone. Every one in Montreal had a telephone, though it was only the beginning of 1889.

Lighthall, the Canadian littérateur, came to call upon us the very first afternoon that we were in Montreal, and he introduced us to our life-long friends, the Robert Reids, and the George Washington Stephens’s. Mrs. Reid and Mrs. Stephens were sisters. Mr. Stephens, the Astor of Montreal, shortly afterwards became Treasurer of the Colony. Lighthall introduced us also to Sir William Van Horne, the President of the great Canadian Pacific Railway, which led to important results. We only stayed in Canada a month then, but that was sufficient to convince me that I did not want to live in a climate where the cold was as dangerous as a tiger. It was brought home to me in an extraordinary way. I was out walking with Mrs. Reid’s daughter, coming back from a tea-party one evening. We saw a drunken man lying in the gutter. She said, “We must get a sleigh and take that drunk to the police-station. He will be dead in an hour if he lies there.”

When roused, he was sufficiently coherent to tell us where he lived, and we took him home. The cold was so intense that she found one of her ears frost-bitten before she got home; she had gone out in an ordinary hat instead of a fur cap, because it was a tea-party and near home. The unexpected delay in the open air to rouse the man, and driving him home, made her pay the penalty of risking a frost-bite. We knew that it was frost-bitten, because it had turned as white as if it had been powdered. The policeman took up a handful of snow, and rubbed it for her—another act of ordinary good Samaritanism in Canada.

We went straight down from Canada to Washington to see the change of Administration from President Cleveland’s regime to President Harrison’s. The climatic contrast was strong; Washington was as warm as Rome. Our arctics and furs looked simply idiotic when we arrived in the station.

The change of Administration in the United States is invested with a good deal of magnificence. All the important people in America, who can spare the time, go to Washington for it. There were many functions during our visit. We were President Cleveland’s guests at his farewell-party, and went to all the Harrison functions. Mrs. Cleveland had a delightful personality; she was very pretty, very elegant, very gracious, a tall woman, rather suggestive of the beautiful Dowager Lady Dudley, with brilliant dark eyes and a brilliant smile. Cleveland was not a pleasant man to meet. When I knew him he was a very strong man who had become very stout. Everything about him suggested power. His face, in spite of its fleshiness, was very powerful. He had a deliberate, rather ungracious way of speaking, and his silences, accentuated by rather resentful eyes, were worse. But a man who starts to sweep the Augean stable for America needs these qualities; and he undoubtedly improved the tone of the party opposed to him in the State by giving them an opposition which they had to respect. But he had no conscience in foreign politics.

The most interesting house we went to was Colonel John Hay’s. Hay was a millionaire twice over, and had been Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary. He was one of America’s best poets, and no man in the country was more renowned for his personal charm or his lofty character. He was afterwards Secretary of State, and Ambassador to Great Britain, and could have been either then, if President Harrison had been able to overcome Hay’s rooted objection to office. And Adalbert Hay, the American Consul-general, who did so much for captive Britons in the Boer War, was his son.

At Hay’s house you met alike the most famous politicians, the most famous members of the Diplomatic Corps, and the most famous authors and artists in America. There we met all the most distinguished members, perhaps I might say the leaders, of the Republican Party.

Washington will always be a bright spot in my memory for another thing. Henry Savage Landor, the explorer, was turned out of his room because the whole hotel was wanted for President Harrison’s party, and as there was not a room to be had in Washington, he slept for the remainder of the time on a shakedown in my room. Both he and I used to spend a great deal of our time with our next-door neighbour in K Street, General William Tecumseh Sherman, the hero of the famous march through Georgia in the Civil War—a grand old man, with a hard-bitten face, but very human. I was present at his funeral in New York; thirty thousand veterans—“the Grand Army of the Republic”—marched behind the riderless horse, which bore his jack-boots and his sword.

From Washington we went to New York, and stayed there till the heat drove us back to Canada, where we had an extraordinarily delightful holiday in store for us. Sir William Van Horne had invited us to go as the guests of the Canadian Pacific Railway right over their line from Montreal to Vancouver and back, and as we had a month or more to spare before the time we settled for our journey, we went first of all to the land of Evangeline—Nova Scotia—and afterwards across the Bay of Fundy to the valley of the St. John river in New Brunswick, and thence to Quebec and Montreal, where we were the guests of the Reids, and for a fortnight of the Stephens’s, in their summer home on the shores of Lac Eau Clair in the Maskinonge forest, and of Agnes Maule Machar at Gananoque on the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence.

This experience of Canadian summer life was an extraordinary education in beauty. A more perfect summer could not be imagined; the sky was always blue, the sun was always vigorous, and there was generally a light breeze. We half lived on the water, since all Canadians near a river or lake have canoes and can manage them with the skill of an Indian. The bathing was enchanting: we could catch a hundredweight of fish sometimes, in that land of many waters. The wild flowers and wild fruits of the meadows and woods were as plentiful as buttercups and daisies in England; it was a land of many forests, many lakes, many rivers; mountains near or distant were always in sight.

Nor was this all. On the lofty shores of the Bay of Fundy and the rock of Quebec, and under the “Royal Mountain” at Montreal there were dear old French houses, built in the days of the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Louis, and most of them intertwined in the romance of Canadian history.

What a lovely and romantic land it was! And we saw it to perfection, for Bliss Carman and Roberts, two Canadian poets, were our guides everywhere. In all my years in Australia I never had half the enjoyment out of the country-life that I derived from those two or three months of a Canadian summer.

The wonders of our journey had hardly begun, though the first sight of the old fortress of Quebec towering over the St. Lawrence, and of the historic Fields of Abraham, are events never to be forgotten.

Still, we felt that a new era in our lives was beginning on that night in early autumn when we steamed out of the chief station of the world’s greatest railway westwards on a journey which would not terminate till we stood on the shores of English Bay, and looked out on to the Pacific Ocean.

We were so anxious to hurry out west to the new land that we only spared ourselves a few days at Toronto to cross Lake Ontario to Niagara, and spend an afternoon and evening with Goldwin Smith and George Taylor Denison. They presented such a contrast—Goldwin Smith, the Cassandra whose voice was always lifted against his country, except when he was among her enemies, and Denison, a descendant of the famous Loyalist, and the leader of Canadian loyalty to England. Denison was the winner of the Emperor of Germany’s prize for the best book on Cavalry Tactics.

From Toronto we had not far to go by train before we found ourselves at Lake Huron, and took a steamer of the company, built like a sea-going vessel, to cross those two vast lakes, Huron and Superior, to Port Arthur. They look like seas, and have storms as violent, though they are fresh water, and in Lake Superior, at any rate, you could immerse the whole of the British Islands. From Port Arthur we trained to Winnipeg, the city of the plains, where we only stayed a few days before flying across the prairie—a limitless plain as broken as the Weald of Kent, jewelled with flowers in spring, and with game fleeing to the horizon when cover is short.

After three days of eye-roaming, we woke to find our view barred by the long wall of the Rocky Mountains, like castles of the gods.

At Banff, in the Rocky Mountains, we were to stay to contemplate the finest open mountain scenery conceivable, and at the Glacier House to contemplate a glacier, a forest and a stupendous peak threatening to overwhelm a mountain inn. The scenery between the two was finer than anything in the Apennines, with its torrents dashing between mighty precipices, and its pine forests sweeping like a prairie fire over mountain and valley, and its background of heaven-piercing Alps.

We entered the Glacier House at a dramatic moment, for Jim, the sports’ guide from Missouri, had just finished pegging out on the floor of one of the sitting-rooms a trophy of his rifle that took me straight back to the happy hours of my boyhood which I spent with Captain Mayne Reid—the rust-coloured skin of a mighty grizzly bear which had turned the scale at twelve hundredweight. Jim the guide had on a buckskin coat and breeches, much stained with killing or skinning the bear: the spectacle was a most impressive one.

From the glacier we tore down the valleys of the Thompson and the Fraser to Vancouver, then a new wooden town perched on a forest clearing with the tree stumps still scattered about its roads, but one of the great seaports of the world in embryo—Canada’s Western Gate, the realisation of the dream of La Salle.

We loved Vancouver, because here we were in a town and country in the making, with a glorious piece of the forest primeval preserved for ever as a national park. For a month we lived there, going every day to see the sun set over the ocean which divided us from the mysterious Orient—thinking over all that we had seen of a country which is like a continent, in that three or four thousand miles’ journey on the newly-opened line.

Then one day a little old bull-dog of a Cunarder, in the service of the great railway, ran up the harbour, and moored herself to the wharf beside the railway station. A tall dark officer, whose voice I heard across the telephone a few hours before writing these lines, was leaning over the gunwale. He and our party smiled pleasantly at each other, and he invited us to go on board. The litter of the Orient was about the decks. Chinese seamen and Japanese passengers were talking the pigeon-English of the East to each other. And we felt that here was the opportunity for stretching our hands across to the East. I accepted the omen, and we booked our passages to Japan—drifting on as we had drifted ever since we landed at Boston a year before.

The stout old Parthia was going to lie a week or two in port before she turned her head round for Yokohama and Hong Kong, and we spent most of this time in an excursion across the strait to Victoria, the capital of Vancouver’s Island, a little bit of England in the West, with a dockyard still in Imperial hands.

As we returned from Victoria early in November, we met, on the steamer, Admiral Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, who was about to be Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, on his way back from a Big-horn expedition in the North.

“Where are you on your way to?” he asked me.

“Japan,” I replied.

“What now?” he said; “you must be fond of bad weather.”

CHAPTER IV
I GO TO JAPAN

The Admiral’s prognostications were correct. We met such heavy seas passing Cape Flattery that the ship seemed to be trying to turn turtle. We were unable to sit on deck from that day until the day that we sighted Japan, and once we had to heave-to for eighteen hours. The worst of the weather being so terrible was that the Captain was unable to execute the Company’s instructions to take us to see the Aleutian Islands, which only whalers know, and drop some stores there for shipwrecked mariners.

But on that December morning, when we found ourselves in smooth water and soft, summery temperature off the flat-topped hills of Japan, surrounded by the billowing sails of countless junks, the very first vessels we had seen since Cape Flattery faded out of sight, we felt rewarded.

The East, the Far East, which I had heard “a-calling” all my life, was right within my grasp. In a few hours’ time I should be standing on the shores of fanciful and mysterious Japan, able to remain there as long as I chose, for we had no fixed plans. We were just drifting on—drifting through our lives—drifting across the world. My heart beat high; I might have written nothing but a few books of verse which hardly anybody read, but, at any rate, I had gone half round the world, and if I wished to stay and dream for the rest of my life in the East, who was to say me nay?

Whatever the causes, the effect was to give me the subject for which I had been waiting to make my position as an author. From the day that I published The Japs at Home, I shed my label of the “Australian Poet,” and became known as the author who has been to Japan.

I even enriched the English language with a word—Japs. It had long been in use in America, but no one had ventured to put it into a book in England. Some thought it was undignified; some thought that it would incense the Japanese. I not only put it into a book, but on the cover of a book, which has sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies. Only to-day I discovered that Japan’s great poet, Yone Noguchi, and the Japanese publicist, T. G. Komai, use it in their books, which are written in English.

I had, in Montreal, bought a No. 1 Kodak—a novelty in those days—and with it I took several hundred photographs in Japan—it was from these that Fenn, the artist, of McClure’s Syndicate, afterwards drew his illustrations for my articles, which were reproduced in the earlier editions of the book. The “Kodaks” not only served as the basis of the illustrations, they made a most admirable journal for me to write from.

I commenced Kodaking and taking notes from the hour that we entered the harbour of Yokohama, and kept it up without flagging till the day that we left Yokohama for San Francisco. It was to those snapshots with camera and pencil that my books on Japan owed the lively touches which gave them their popularity.

We were a winter and a spring and a summer in Japan—for all except six weeks which we spent in China. I paid most of my hotel bills in Japan by writing my Handbook to Japan for the Club Hotel Company.

In Japan we spent our entire days in sight-seeing. If we were not going over interesting buildings (and I over Yoshiwaras), temples, castles, baths or tea-houses in marvellous gardens—we were wandering about the streets or the country in our rikishas, dismounting when there was anything to photograph or examine or purchase. The rikisha is a most convenient way of getting about for a person who is making notes, because he can write as he goes along, and pull up as often as he likes when there is anything which needs his attention. Also, your Jinrikisha boy, if you choose carefully, speaks enough English to act as an interpreter, and, from having taken foreigners to the sights so often, is usually a tolerably efficient guide. Besides which, it is a novel, pleasant and exciting method of locomotion.

We hired the best two rikisha men we could hear of by the week, and never regretted the extravagance. They were always there when we wanted them, and in a very few days grasped exactly what we wished to do and see. One was called Sada and the other Taro.

It was in this way that I acquired my knowledge of the Japan which can be seen on the surface, and which is all that the average foreigner wishes to see, and gave myself one of the three or four subjects with which my name is identified.

We spent the first month in Yokohama, a much-maligned place, for it had in those days an unspoiled native town at the back of the settlement, and its environs were charming, whether one went towards Negishi or towards Ikegami: I found enough to keep me hard at work for a month.

On the last day of the year we went to Tokyo. We had a reason for that; we wished to see the great fair in the Ginza, which is one of the most typical sights of Japan. Savage Landor, who had been in Tokyo for some time, wrote that we must on no account miss it, and he took rooms for us in the Tokyo hotel—which the Japanese called Yadoya, “the hotel.”

The Tokyo hotel was an experience: it had originally been the Yashiki or town-house of a feudal prince, in the days when the Shogun reigned at Tokyo. It had a moat (into which Miss Lorimer, who accompanied us on all our travels, fell on the first night we were there, but which fortunately contained more mud than water), and stood in an angle of the outer works of the castle.

Just below it, small craft made a port of the outer moat of the castle: in its courtyard carpenters were using up the large amount of waste space which there is in a Yashiki by nailing fresh rooms on to the Daimio’s house, to make the hotel larger. It could not be called anything but nailing on, because it was made of wood and paper, and was not properly dovetailed into the existing building, but simply tacked on. We learnt many upside-down notions by watching the builders and carpenters, who did most things inside-out or upside-down, according to our notions. Also the Japanese manager, the Abè San who was murdered a few months ago, borrowed my clothes to have them copied by a Japanese tailor, and the waiters wore their European clothes over their native dress, and wriggled out of them behind a screen as soon as a meal was over. If you called them at such a moment, whatever your sex, they might come forward with their trousers half on and half off. The Japanese have their own ideas of conventions between the sexes.

Wandering through that fair at the Ginza took one into the very heart of Japan: it is held to enable people to settle their debts before New Year’s Day.

Apart from the obituary parks of Shiba and Ueno, Tokyo is not reckoned rich in temples, though it has a few very famous temples in the suburbs, and more than a few within a short excursionary distance. But Shiba and Ueno—and especially the former—present an epitome of Japanese life, art, scenery and history.

It is difficult to imagine anything more beautiful than Shiba, though the Japanese have a proverb that you must not call anything beautiful till you have seen Nikko. The fir woods in which it stands are on a low ridge commanding an exquisitive view of the Gulf of Tokyo, and in this wood are embosomed the mausolea of most of the earlier Shoguns of the Tokugawa House, which came to an end this winter with the death of the abdicated Shogun. Each mausoleum has a beautiful temple beside the tomb. The presence of so many temples has led the Japanese to exhaust their landscape art on Shiba with lake and cherry-grove and cryptomeria. Such natives as do not go there for religion are attracted by the pleasure city, with its famous tea-houses, like the Maple Club, its shows, and, above all, by its dancing. Here you may see the No-dance, the Kagura-dance, and some of the best Geishas.

But the chief charm of Shiba to me was its absolute Orientalness compared to the rest of Tokyo.

No sooner are you inside the great red gateway of the temples than you are in the world of fairy-tales. For temple after temple opens up before you, low fantastic structures, on which Oriental imagination has run riot in colour and form. You are bewildered by the innumerable courtyards of stone lanterns, the paraphernalia of drum-tower and bell-tower, fountain and dancing-stage, which surround them. You are sobered by the dark groves between the temples, which contain the tombs.

Temple and tomb are thronged by streams of dignified natives, some come to worship and some to see the sights. Here you will find a service going on, with white-robed priests kneeling on the mirrored floor of black lacquer, for which you have to remove your boots. Outside the actual temples the shows are in full blast, and picnicking proceeds everywhere. All the Japanese are in their native dress. Gay little musumes and gorgeous geishas flutter before you. The grand tea-houses offer fresh visions of the Orient with their Geisha dances and their fantastic gardens.

Ueno has the added charm of a large lake, covered with lotus-blossoms in summer.

At no great distance from Shiba is the Shinagawa Yoshiwara, which, for fantastic beauty, surpasses anything in Japan. With these and the water life of the Nihombashi, and the life of the poor going on all day in the streets—for the poor Japanese takes the front off his house all through the day to air it—I should have found good occupation for my notebook and camera for years.

If we had not been urged by other foreigners, I do not know when we should have left Tokyo. And we saw little enough of them except at meal-times, or when we went to the Frasers (Hugh Fraser was British Minister of Tokyo, and husband of the well-known author, Mrs. Hugh Fraser, Marion Crawford’s sister), or the Napiers. The Master of Napier, the Lord Napier and Ettrick, just dead, was his First Secretary. But at meal-times they talked so much of Easter at Miyanoshita, and the cherry-blossom festival at Kyoto, and the annual festival at Nikko, and the Great Buddha at Kamakura, and the sacred shrines of Ise, that we fortunately felt obliged to visit them.

Miyanoshita, the favourite holiday-resort of the Europeans in Japan, is high up in the mountains. The valley on the right of the long ridge which leads up to it in spring is ablaze with azaleas and flowering trees. It, itself, is perched on a mountain-side, above a densely-wooded valley. Exquisite walks can be taken from it, such as the trip to Hakone, the beautiful village which stands on the blue lake at the foot of Fujiyama, in which the immortal grace of the great mountain is reflected whenever the sun or moon is above the horizon. Miyanoshita is equally famous for its mountain air and its mountain baths. The boiling water, highly impregnated with sulphur, is brought down in bamboo pipes from the bosom of the mountain to deep wooden baths sunk in the floor of the hotel bathing-house. Life here is one long picnic: the energetic take walks, the lazy are carried in chairs over the hills: people fly here for week-ends in spring, and from the heat and damp of the summer.

Its great rival is Nikko, another mountain village, embosomed in shady groves, with woods full of wild hydrangeas. In June Nikko is crowded for the festival of Toshogu, the deified founder of the dynasty of Shoguns, which was ended by the revolution of 1868—the principal festival of Japan, inaugurated with the grandest procession to be seen nowadays, in which all who take part in it wear the ceremonial dresses of three hundred years ago.

Nikko has the two most beautiful temples in the magic land—those of Iyeyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, and his grandson, Iyemitsu. Here you see the most perfect lacquer and carving in all Japan. And their courtyards are exquisitely terraced on the mountain-side. Here, too, besides these and other glorious temples, there are the added charms of scenery, a foaming sky-blue river, running beneath the sacred scarlet bridge, and between the avenue of Buddhas, commons of scarlet azalea, and thickets of wild wistaria.

Having seen Nikko, the sacred city of the Shoguns, one must needs see Kyoto, the city of the Mikados, and Nara.

For seven centuries prior to the revolution in our own day, Kyoto was the capital of the Mikados. Here they lived like gods behind a veil, only penetrated by the hierarchy: they never left the palace gates except in a closed palanquin: they added little but tombs to the city, and their tombs were never shown. But the Shoguns, who ruled in their name, and others great in the land, adorned Kyoto with some of the greatest and most interesting temples in Japan, such as the temples of the Gold and Silver Pavilions, the two Hongwanji temples, the temple of the Thirty-Three Thousand Images, and the chief temple of Inari the Goddess of Rice. And it being the ancient capital, we found the city full of old prints and curios, and the old-fashioned pleasure resorts of Japan.

Kyoto was a city of the pleasure-seeker of old time, as capitals are wont to be. It has wonderful tea-houses in the city; its temple grounds are like permanent fairs; and within a rikisha drive is Lake Biwa, one of the most exquisite lakes in the world, whose shores exhibit the chefs d’œuvres of the Japanese landscape-creator. Nothing could be more exquisite than the temple grounds on the shores of Lake Biwa.

Of the many old-time festivals of Kyoto, the most famous survival is the Miyako-odori, or cherry-blossom festival, held every year, when visitors flock to Kyoto to see the cherry-groves in full blossom. The feature of the festival is a wonderful ballet, for which the best dancers in Japan gather in Kyoto. Even the Duke and Duchess of Connaught came to Kyoto for it, when they were in Japan. We stayed for a long time at Yaami’s when they were there, and when the Duke learned from Colonel Cavaye, his private secretary, that I was a journalist, he gave me permission to accompany his party to any function or expedition which I wished to describe. The most interesting of them was the shooting of the rapids of the Katsuragawa, some miles from Kyoto, where thirteen miles of cataracts are negotiated in huge punts, built of springy boards. As we were buffeting down the rapids, the Duke told me that our present King, then Prince George of Wales, had said that shooting those rapids, and the baths of Miyanoshita, where you have natural hot water in wooden boxes sunk in the floor, were the two best things in the world.

In Kyoto, an antique city on a broad plain, embosomed in hills, capped by temples, one has the very essence of old Japan. We stayed there a long time, absorbing an atmosphere which may soon pass away, never to return.

Within a day’s rikisha drive of Kyoto is Nara, with its thousand-year-old treasury of the most notable possessions of the Mikados, and its glorious temples, and its sacred deer-park, and its acres of scarlet azalea thickets.

We visited all; we visited the two great cities of Osaka and Nagoya, with their magnificent castles, and Kamakura, with its gigantic Buddha and its ancient monasteries. We visited all the most famous cities and points of scenery in Japan; and the pleasure of our visit was heightened by our going away to China for six weeks in the middle of it, because when we came back our eyes were far keener to observe and to appreciate, while we had the knowledge acquired in our former visit to guide us.

We were truly sorry to leave Japan. I should be quite content to be living there still; but if we had remained there, Japan would not have taken its part in my development as a writer, for though I should doubtless have compiled a book or books about Japan, they would have been sent home as the productions of an amateur, and very likely have had such difficulty in finding a publisher that they would have been brought out in some hole-and-corner way, instead of my selling The Japs at Home in the open market, and thereby laying the foundation of my career as a travel-book writer.

Japan supplied me with the material for several books, not counting the handbook which I wrote for the Club Hotel—A Japanese Marriage, next in point of sales to The Japs at Home; Queer Things About Japan, which sold best of all my books in guinea form; More Queer Things About Japan, which I wrote with Norma Lorimer; When We Were Lovers in Japan, a novel which was originally published under the title of Playing the Game; and Pictures of Japan; while I have written countless articles and short stories about the country.

I had almost forgotten that I had a book—my Lester the Loyalist—published in Japan. Though it only contained about twenty pages, it took two months to print. How the result gratified me, I wrote in The Japs at Home.

“I forgot all the delays when I saw the printed pages, they were so beautiful, and really, considering that Mr. Mayeda was the only man in the establishment who could read a word of English, the printing was exceedingly correct. The blocks had turned out a complete success, though, of course, the proofs of the covers did not look as well as they would when mounted and crêped.

“The Japanese have a process by which they can make paper crêpe book-covers as stiff as buckram.

“‘Well, Mr. Mayeda, how did your little boy like the stamp-book you mended up for him so beautifully?’ I asked one day.

“‘Ah! it is very sad; he has gone to hell. But the little boy, he has loved the stamp-book so that he has taken it to hell with him. It is on his grave, do you call it?’

“Mr. Mayeda was thinking of what the missionaries had told him when he was learning English.

“A few weeks more passed. Mr. Mayeda brought us the perfect book. He was so flushed and tearful that I poured him a couple of bumpers of vermouth, which he drank off with the excitement of an unemployed workman in England when he makes a trifle by chance, and spends it right off on his beloved gin.

“‘Is anything the matter, Mr. Mayeda?’ I asked.

“‘It is so sad. My other little boy has gone to hell, too. And I am so poor, and I have to keep my wife’s uncle, and my father is very silly, and so I get drunk every night.’

“The books he had brought were exquisite. The printing was really very correct, and the effect of the long hexameter lines, in the handsome small pica type, on the oblong Japanese double leaf of silky ivory-tinted paper, every page flowered with maple-leaves in delicate pearl-grey under the type, was as lovely as it was unique.

“The block printings on every single leaf were done by hand—the leaf being laid over the block, and rubbed into it by a queer palm-leaf-pad burnisher.

“The covers were marvels of beauty, made of steel-grey paper crêpe, ornamented, the back one with three little sere and curled-up maple leaves drifting before the wind, and the front one with a spray of maple leaves in all their autumn glory and variety of tints, reproduced to the life.

“Across the right-hand end of the sprig was pasted a long white silk label in the Japanese style. The good taste, the elegance, the colours of this cover, fairly amazed me.”

Our visit to China was taken at the instigation of friends in Japan, who made an annual trip to the Hong Kong races. I cannot say that it interested me as much as Japan; but we only had time to visit Hong Kong, Shanghai, Canton and Macao, and of these, Canton alone was absolutely Chinese. Canton is as typical a Chinese city as one could desire—supreme in commerce, a hot-bed of Chinese aspirations. But it is very poorly off for fine old buildings; it is more interesting for its huge water population, living in long streets of boats, and for the wonderful gardens of some of its merchants.

Macao is chiefly interesting as a very ancient outpost of Europe in the East, old enough for Camoens to have lived and written his immortal Lusiad there in the sixteenth century. It has little to call for the attention of the stranger, except nice old gardens with huge banyan-trees, and gambling hells, where you learn to play Fan-tan. It only flourishes as an Alsatia for rogues outside of British and Chinese jurisdiction.

Shanghai is a fine European town, with luxuries and conveniences, for which Hong-Kongers sigh, and a most picturesque walled native town, which contains one of the most beautiful tea-houses in the East.

Hong Kong is a gay city, because it is so full of British naval and military officers. It is also rather a beautiful place, having a mountain right over the town, which is the sanatorium and summer-resort. I met many old schoolfellows there, who took care that invitations should be sent to us for all the Service festivities, which are so thick at Race-time. And they also told me what to see in Hong Kong and Canton and Macao.

But, knowing that I was only to be in China for a month and a half, I made no effort to ground myself in knowledge of everyday China, but gave myself up to enjoying the gaieties and tropical luxuries.

China thus had no effect on my literary development. Our stay there was a mere holiday, at which I had a fresh and exhaustive round of military and naval festivities.

The island of Hong Kong is not a good place for studying the Chinaman, except as an employé of the Englishman.

On our return from China to Japan we were fascinated by the almost tropical beauty of the Japanese summer. There was also a good deal of British gaiety, for the Fleet had moved just before us from China to Japan.