I told him that we had lunched, introduced him to Foe as the
Malefactor, and invited him to come back and dine with us at Prince's
before catching the late train for Oxford. He answered that fate
always smiled on him at these funerals, paid off his cabby, and
joined us.

Our dinner that evening was a brilliant success; and we left it to
drive to Paddington to see the boy off. He had dropped a few pounds
over the Derby but made the most of it up by a plunge on the last
race: "and what with your standing me a dinner, I'm all up on the
day's working and that cheerful I could kiss the guard." He wasn't
in the least drunk, either; but explained to me very lucidly, on my
taxing him with his real offence--cutting Oxford for a day when, the
Eights being a short week off, he should have been in strict
training--that all the strength of the B.N.C. boat that year lying on
stroke side (he rowed at "six"), one might look on a _Peche Melba_
and a Corona almost in the light of a prescription. "Friend of my
youth," he added--addressing me, "and"--addressing Foe--"prop, sole
prop, of my declining years--as you love me, be cruel to be kind and
restrain me when I show a disposition to kiss yon bearded guard."

As the tail of the train swung out of the station Foe said
meditatively, "I like that boy," . . . And so it was. That autumn,
when Jimmy Collingwood, having achieved a pass degree--"by means," as
he put it, "only known to myself"--came up to share my chambers and
read for the Bar, he and Foe struck up a warm affection. For once,
moreover, Foe broke his habit of keeping his friends in separate
cages. He was too busy a man to join us often; but when we met we
were the Three Musketeers.

My father died in the Autumn of 1906; and this kept me down in the
country until the New Year; although he had left his affairs as
straight as a balance-sheet. Death duties and other things. . . .
His account-books, note-books, filed references and dockets;
his diaries kept, for years back, with records of rents and
tithe-charges, of farms duly visited and crops examined field by
field; appraisements of growing timber, memoranda for new plantings,
queer charitable jottings about his tenants, their families,
prospects, and ways to help them; all this tally, kept under God's
eye by one who had never suffered man to interfere with him, gave my
Radicalism a pretty severe jerk.

You see, here, worked out admirably in practice, was the rural