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establishment, for which she paid a rent of £20 a year. But her dominion was not subject to such limitations. She ruled imaginatively, transcendentally; the solid glory of Chatham had been transmuted into the phantasy of an Arabian Night. No doubt she herself believed that she was something more than a chimerical Empress. When a French traveler was murdered in the desert, she issued orders for the punishment of the offenders; punished they were, and Lady Hester actually received the solemn thanks of the French Chamber. It seems probable, however, that it was the Sultan's orders rather than Lady Hester's which produced the desired effect. In her feud with her terrible neighbor, the Emir Beshyr, she maintained an undaunted front. She kept the tyrant at bay; but perhaps the Emir, who, so far as physical force was concerned, held her in the hollow of his hand, might have proceeded to extremities, if he had not received a severe admonishment from Stratford Canning at Constantinople. What is certain is that the ignorant and superstitious populations around her feared and loved her, and that she, reacting to her own mysterious prestige, became at last even as they. She plunged into astrology and divination; she awaited the moment when, in accordance with prophecy, she should enter Jerusalem side by side with the Mahdi, the Messiah; she kept two sacred horses, destined, by sure signs, to carry her and him to their last triumph. The Orient had mastered her utterly. She was no longer an Englishwoman, she declared; she loathed England; she would never go there again; if she went anywhere it would be to Arabia, to 'her own people.' Her expenses were immense not only for herself but for others, for she poured out her hospitality with a

she

noble hand. She ran into debt, and was swindled by the money-lenders; her steward cheated her, her servants pilfered her; her distress was at last acute. She fell into fits of terrible depression, bursting into dreadful tears and savage cries. Her habits grew more and more eccentric. She lay in bed all day, and sat up all night, talking unceasingly for hour upon hour to Dr. Meryon, who alone of her English attendants remained with her, Mrs. Fry having withdrawn to more congenial scenes long since. The doctor was a poor-spirited and muddleheaded man, but he was a good listener; and there he sat while that extraordinary talk flowed on talk that scaled the heavens and ransacked the earth, talk in which memories of an abolished past-stories of Mr. Pitt and of George III, vituperations against Mr. Canning, mimicries of the Duchess of Devonshire - mingled phantasmagorically with doctrines of Fate and planetary influence, and speculations on the Arabian origin of the Scottish clans, and lamentations over the wickedness of servants; till the unaccountable figure, with its robes and its long pipe, loomed through the tobacco-smoke like some vision of a Sibyl in a dream. She might be robbed and ruined, her house might crumble over her head; but she talked on. She grew ill and desperate; yet still she talked. Did she feel that the time was coming when she should talk no more?

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she hardly moved from her bedroom while her servants rifled her belongings and reduced the house to a condition of indescribable disorder and filth. Three dozen hungry cats ranged through the rooms, filling the courts with frightful noises. Dr. Meryon, in the midst of it all, knew not whether to cry or laugh. At moments the great lady regained her ancient fire; her bells pealed tumultuously for hours together; or she leapt up, and arraigned the whole trembling household before her, with her Arab war-mace in her hand. Her finances grew more and more involved - grew at length irremediable. It was in vain that the faithful Lord Hardwicke pressed her to return to England to settle her affairs. Return to England, indeed! To England, that ungrateful, miserable country, where, so far as she could see, they had forgotten the very name of Mr. Pitt! The final blow fell when a letter came from the English authorities threatening to cut off her

The Athenaeum

pension for the payment of her debts. Upon that, after dispatching a series of furious missives to Lord Palmerston, to Queen Victoria, to the Duke of Wellington, she renounced the world. She commanded Dr. Meryon to return to Europe, and he- how could he have done it? - obeyed her. Her health was broken, she was over sixty, and, save for her vile servants, absolutely alone. She lived for nearly a year after he left her we know no more. She had vowed never again to pass through the gate of her house; but did she sometimes totter to her garden - that beautiful garden which she had created, with its roses and its fountains, its alleys and its bowersand look westward at the sea? The end came in June, 1839. Her servants immediately possessed themselves of every movable object in the house. But Lady Hester cared no longer: she was lying back in her bed-inexplicable, grand, preposterous, with her nose in the air.

The New Statesman

BLAMING SONS

BY T'AO CH'IEN (365-427 A.D.) (An Apology for His Own Drunkenness) WHITE hair covers my temples,

I am wrinkled and seared beyond repair,
And though I have got five sons,
They all hate paper and brush.
A-shu is eighteen:

For laziness there is none like him.
A-shüan does his best,

But really loathes the Fine Arts.

Yung-tuan is thirteen,

But does not know 'six' from 'seven.'

T'ung-tzu in his ninth year

Is only concerned with things to eat.
If Heaven treats me like this,

What can I do but fill my cup?

(Translated from the Chinese by Arthur Waley.

(From a Correspondent)

THERE are many ambitious projects for regular aerial services metaphorically, but not as yet literally in the air. But there is one service which has actually been in operation for some time, and which, so far as we know, is the only regular service for purposes other than military yet established. We allude to the regular mail and passenger service which (weather permitting) plies daily between the Buc aerodrome (Paris) and the Hendon aerodrome (London). To the British air service belongs the credit of the first practical demonstration that flying as a means of traveling is, at the immediate moment, and not at some future time vaguely anticipated, seriously a competitor of locomotion by land and water. The significance of this feat is emphasized by the fact that the service has been in operation through the worst months of the year. The bad weather conditions, while they have made the service irregular, have shown that it can be run safely and without confusion as an alternative to the ordinary land and water service. Trustworthy meteorological reports can be received sufficiently early to enable the authorities to notify His Majesty's mails or passengers, who are booked for the air, whether conditions are such as to permit of the journey. In default of suitable weather for the air passage, there is time enough to make other arrangements.

The Paris to London service is not, of course, open to the public. 'I am no fee'd post,' our pilot would say if the need arose, like the Duke's messenger in a famous play. The service is at present confined to carrying urgent

mails in connection with the work of the Peace Conference and transporting members of the British Delegation, whose work is sufficiently important to make them free of the air. The advantages are obvious. Even with every facility that our diplomatic service can secure for travelers to and from Paris, the journey under present conditions is tedious and exasperating in the extreme. It is rarely accomplished under twelve hours. The boats and trains are crowded. The delays are frequent and prolonged. Traveling by air one waits for nobody; one is free from the necessity of continually presenting sheaves of forms relating to food, aliens, embarkation, and so forth, and probably losing some of them by the way; and one arrives in two hours twenty minutes even on a bad day. One is not necessarily colder than upon the deck of a channel steamer in March; there is a pleasant breeze and a good view of the country; there is also an immunity from seasickness and such physical ills as are likely to arise from the hasty consumption of a déjeuner somewhere between Paris and Boulogne (première, deuxième ou troisième service) of which we have had to deprive our less enterprising fellow travelers. Those who consider that these advantages are canceled by risks which no responsible person should wantonly incur or discomforts sharp in proportion to their brevity, are either extremely nervous or somewhat ill-informed. The hospitable officers at Buc or Hendon provide elaborately for the comfort of their visitors, though this may entail fitting a passenger who is five feet

three inches into a suit constructed for six feet two. As to air-sickness, this only needs to be said: if a pilot wanted to make his passenger sick, he could probably do so in ways known to experts of the profession. Normal progress through the air, even on a rough day, involves nothing worse than being occasionally slapped and bumped and dropped-pleasantries which have nothing of the disconcerting and treacherous import of the apparently more lenient motions of a bad day in the Channel.

Members of the British Delegation in Paris are in a position to judge to what extent the general public is likely to avail itself of the new means of locomotion. The Delegation is a fairly representative body. All ages and dispositions are to be found. Elderly gentlemen, not conspicuously dashing, come and go by air, as a matter of course. The public will settle down to the idea of traveling by air faster than our grandfathers settled down to the idea of traveling behind a steam engine. It is less disconcerting, we imagine, for a person who has traveled in an express train or a fast motor car to travel in a D.H. 4 than it was for a person who had never traveled faster than a stage coach to realize that he was going sixty miles an hour and had entrusted his life to the care and fidelity of a fallible human being in a signal box. The coming popularity of the air is no longer a matter of speculation. The general The general public will take to the air as kindly as the residents of the Hotel Majestic. These same residents have now to be officially restrained from claiming the privilege of the air. Unless they are able to plead that the less satisfactory route by land and water will not serve their official purposes, they are firmly discouraged by the authorities.

The weather report comes through

to the hotel about half-past eight in the morning. If it is favorable, one thankfully turns one's back upon the Gare du Nord and the horrors which lie behind its portals and drives out into the Bois and the fair country beyond. In half-an-hour one arrives at Buc by way of woods and terraces and glimpses of the river. One is forced into a kind of diving dress, hoisted into a "'bus,' and, if new to the business, instructed not to put one's foot on the controls. Thereafter comes an odd two hours of solitary contemplation of the world and the works of man from a novel point of view. The continual roar of the engine and the monotonous rush of wind induce meditation. We feel that Teufelsdröckh in his tower had but limited opportunities for philosophizing as compared with our own. It is pleasant to see a village, the merest toy of a village, lost in the gloom of a dull day, but presently to be struck unawares with the traveling sunlight. For our wings are Olympian and we see before the event what is in store for mankind, sunlight or shadow. We realize how easy it would be to see human history as a play, tragical, pastoral, historical, and so through all the degrees of Polonius, if only we could get sufficiently far away. Paris passes away from us on our left, absurdly pretty, absurdly small, obviously amusing. The big woods where people can get lost, the fields where generations have labored ('man comes and tills the field and lies beneath'), the highways and hills and rivers which have determined the course of history, are simply entertaining, and we wonder how for one moment we could ever have taken them seriously. The splendor of cities, the squalor of suburbs, the lure of rivers and roads, the mystery of woods, the nobility of hills all these things are confounded and lost in a mere

prettiness as of toys, divertingly arranged to please us. Passing from France to England across a stretch of sea tidily breaking into white ribbons of foam along the shore and dotted with toy steamers with real wakes to them as in a conventional picture, one notes, quite in the spirit of Fabre with his bramble bees, that upon one side of the water, men prefer to build their roads as straight as a ruler, whereas, on the other side they prefer them to wander and lose themselves. And we just wonder why the curious little creatures should behave thus and not otherwise.

One can imagine an artist of the modern school being profoundly resentful of the world as seen from an aeroplane in a cross-country flight. He would feel that it was all too charming to be true. Skimming the underside of a cloud is almost pure Drury Lane. The one thing that relieves our mild pleasure in a monotonous prettiness

The Saturday Review

belying all our old human standards of significance and beauty is a curious sort of satisfaction at having for a moment secured a new perspective, a sense of remoteness and superiority, such as seasons our contemplation of things played upon the stage.

And then a sudden relief from the noise which has become part of our physical condition of being surprises us, and looking down we suddenly perceive that even the Edgware Road can be quaintly picturesque from two thousand feet and that we are beginning to circle down toward Hendon. A few moments later we can exchange views with the pilot for the first time since leaving Paris. We have come over in just over two hours. But for the grace of the air we should be somewhere between Paris and Boulogne with all the sordid details of a channel crossing before us and a prospect of reaching London, with luck, in time for supper.

MISS ALLARDYCE'S SOLDIER

BY LUCY LOCKHART

DOLORES ALLARDYCE was no longer as young as her face suggested. For twenty years she had sat in the same chair at the same table day by day, till the office in the quiet city street had become a home. The clergyman whose clerk she had been was her pastor and the tower of her knowledge; and the propaganda of his pious tenets was the duty of her life.

He was dead, and she sat alone. His sanctum, the inner room, was empty; and in her heart she knew that a

VOL. 14-NO. 707

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