r,
singularly characteristic. Will you forgive me, dearest, if I reel
off to the only soul that can be trusted to enjoy my enjoyment, a
kind of report of the meeting? It will revivify my own memories. And
one thing at least that I said in my speech I thoroughly believed
in--"if there is any prayer I should be inclined to make it is that I
should forget nothing in my life."

The proceedings opened with dinner. The illustrated menus were wildly
appreciated: every person got all the rest to sign on the menu and
then took it away as a memento. Then the telegrams from Kruger,
Chamberlain, Dreyfus and George Meredith were read. Then I proposed
the toast of the Queen. I merely said that nothing could ever be
alleged against the Queen, except the fact that she is not a member
of the J.D.C. and that I thought it spoke well for the chivalry of
Englishmen that with this fact she had never been publicly taunted. I
said I knew that the virtues of Queen Victoria had become somewhat
platitudinous, but I thought it was a fortunate country in which the
virtues of its powerful ones are platitudes. The toast was then
drunk. . . .

After a pause and a little conversation, I called upon Lawrence
Solomon to propose the toast of "The School." He was very amusing
indeed. Most of his speech would not be very comprehensible to an
outsider for it largely consisted of an ingenious dove-tailing of the
sentences in the Latin and Greek Arnold. I shall never forget the
lucid and precise enunciation with which he delivered the idiotic
sentences in those works, more especially where he said, "such a
course would be more agreeable to Mr. Cholmeley and I would rather
gratify such a man as he than see the King of the Persians."

Cholmeley, amid roars of welcome, rose to respond. I think I must
have told you in a former letter that Cholmeley is a former
classmaster of ours, a former house-master of Bentley's, and one of
the nicest men at St. Paul's. We invited him as the only visitor. He
said a great deal that was very amusing, mostly a commentary on
Solomon's remarks about the Latin Arnold. One remark he made was that
he possessed one particular Latin Arnold, formerly the property of
the President, which he had withdrawn from him "with every expression
of contumely"--because it was drawn all over with devils. He made
some very sound remarks abo