gurgle; bubble, gurgle; bubble gurgle, squeak, squeak. Of course, they had been listening. How much had they taken in ? Oughtn't Uncle Bliss to have taken the pygmy, Mummy?" Irene asked.

66

"Uncle Bliss?" Marjorie's mock-frightened gasp of horror and incredulity was a sort of new edition of her laugh.

I hastened to reassure her. "Oh, don't mind Uncle Bliss. He is not popular in the family. Besides, he is nobody's uncle.' "He is my godfather," Irene explained loyally.

"I am afraid he is impossible," Angela observed, "even as a godfather. I don't think we ought to ask him here again."

"Oh, Mummy!" The children's loyalty was shocked. They protested. The warmth of the alliance was unmistakable.

"You are really fond of Uncle Bliss" Marjorie asked them.

"Yes, frightfully."

For the moment the slavedealer's prestige was re-established.

"And he is going to have a Zoo," Irene informed Marjorie.

and moon had a beer quarrel, and the sun threw mud at the moon. It stuck. 'How should the moon wash it off?' Chimbashi asked, having no hands." Marjorie entertained us with folk-tales and riddles through lunch. The children's appetite was insatiable. Marjorie said it made her feel like the clown at the circus. "One more riddle, then. Why did the early Christian martyrs frequent the A.B.C.? Give it up Because they preferred it to lions. No, Chimbashi did not tell me that. I made it up."

After lunch she was carried off like Uncle Bliss to see the museum. She was greatly impressed by the purple emperor and the lunatic's wooden shoe, and she was so enraptured by the caddis worm, or the house it had built of sticks and pebbles and bits of shell, that the children gave it her; there were plenty of duplicates in the stream at the bottom of the garden. And in exchange she promised them a Goliath beetle, the biggest beetle in the world, which goes planing down the wind like a sea-gull or an aeroplane. And a deadleaf insect; with folded wings, you couldn't tell it from a crumpled-up leaf; and a blue bird-winged butterfly, and an enormous African papilio. And when she could lay her hands on it she would send them the antelope's horn with the chief's shadow in it. She believed it was in a case at her agent's, but she had not seen it since the day it was presented to her.

her

The children escorted back from the schoolroom, one on each side, with a show of idolatrous proprietorship which made me doubtful of Uncle Bliss'

continued ascendancy. Direct action of some kind was needed on the part of the slavedealer if he meant to maintain his prestige. I almost wished it had been wet in the morning. It would have been interesting to see him and Marjorie together. In the middle of lunch the rain came down in torrents, and went on until after tea. Angela was saying that it was a mere fluke, a meteorological caprice, that he was not with us, when all of a sudden he bore down on us on his bicycle like an unexpected eclipse.

We all met in the drive. Marjorie was walking home, and we were seeing her to the gate. Uncle Bliss dismounted and shook hands quite heartily.

"I am sorry you could not come to lunch," Angela said. "I am glad you are sorry," was his retort.

What did he mean by that? He prized Angela's disappointment, I suppose. It was a very positive statement, and obviously sincere. Uncle Bliss sometimes came out with things which made you suspect that he was human underneath.

Angela introduced them. Uncle Bliss fixed our guest with his impersonal stare. Who?" he said.

Angela repeated Marjorie's name. Uncle Bliss examined her perfunctorily, as if she had been some exhibit in a dealer's

collection, and he not in a purchasing vein.

Marjorie's survey of Uncle Bliss, on the contrary, was interested, I was going to say responsive, but there was nothing to respond to. Anyhow, she included him in her scheme of things. She looked at him keenly, even expectantly, the friendly challenging look of the woman who is habitually pleasant, but quite ready for a skirmish.

Uncle Bliss, however, was not in an oncoming mood. He only said, "Been in Africa. Eh? You like Africa? That's right." Marjorie laughed her crow pheasant laugh which touches a sympathetic nerve in most vertebræ.

Uncle Bliss looked at her again; this time a little more curiously. "Funny country, Africa," he said. Whether it was funny because Marjorie laughed at it, or because it had produced that peculiar laugh in Marjorie, he did not explain, but turned to Angela and demanded abruptly, Where are the children?"

66

And that was all that passed between these mighty hunters. Uncle Bliss had his stock of formulas for these encounters. They served as chevaux-de-frise to his unassailable self-preoccupation, creating a solitude all round him. There was little variety in them, only he had a way of talking to children as if they were grown-ups-in which case the defences were

sometimes carried,-and to grown-ups as if they were children. The funny part of it was that Marjorie had shot just as many lions as he-I believe more,-and she had stood up to charging buffaloes, and was going to help to govern Africa.

"Did you tell him anything about her?" I asked Angela, when he had disappeared with the children.

Angela had told him a great deal, and suggested that they might like to compare notes, but he wouldn't listen. She couldn't get it through to him. He was too full of the Clapperhouse. It was only when she told him that Marjorie was engaged to Sir Claude Critchley that he seemed to realise whom she was talking about. The name sank in, took him out of himself, and, of course, back into himself, but with something that connected him tangibly with his surroundings.

"Critchley, did you say? Engaged? Do you mean to say that she is going to marry him?

Angela told him that they were going to be married at Kisumu in the autumn.

Uncle Bliss dug his pointed stick into the gravel. "Poor girl, poor girl!" he said. Then after a pause and further savage prodding of the gravel, as if he had got the point into Critchley's abdomen, "Well, well, let's hope she will make him sorry for it."

HIS Britannic Majesty's Ambassador at Paris is usually a considerable figure in world business. Even in days when the terrors of rapid communication tend to deprive diplomats all over the world of any opportunity of personal initiative, the Paris Embassy, the nearest of them all to London, is regarded as a prize. Within more or less recent years the post has been held by men of most varied distinction and attainment. There have been Pro-Consuls such as Dufferin and Hardinge, men of letters such as Lytton and Crewe, heads of great English families such as Derby, steadygoing diplomats of the Monson type, and men more dependent upon the sturdiness of their character than upon the finesse of their intelligence, such as the late Lord Bertie of Thame.

They have all left their patine of history behind them on No. 39 Rue du Faubourg St Honoré, which was purchased by the Iron Duke as an Embassy for the ridiculous sum of £40,000. Each temporary occupant has shown off with pride to a changing set of guests the beauties of the garden, the splendour of the famous gold plate, once the property-as was the house-of Pauline Borghese. Lytton was

a polished cultured man of literary tastes. Under his reign the Embassy became a centre of fashionable and artistic life in Paris. With Monson its guests were found rather more strictly in official circles. Soldiers and great names of the aristocracy figured most frequently in the entertainment book of Lord Derby's days. Lord Bertie, who for a Paris Ambassador was a man of moderate means, was, with great injustice, sometimes reproached by the ignorant for never doing any entertaining at all. Such complaints were usually to be found in the mouths of self-important bores and social climbers, whose acquaintance with the Embassy was limited strictly by an invitation to the annual reception on the King's birthday or to the annual garden party. As a matter of fact, Bertie, for a man so inherently Tory, indeed almost snobbish in his social ideas, had a very large acquaintance in all kinds of the many forms of Society in France. He entertained a curious mixture of Rothschilds, Gunzbourgs, and old French aristocracy of the Saint Germain vintage, leavened by frequent visits from British Ministers, men from the front, and Members of Parliament,

among whom were several representatives of Labour.

An Ambassador even nowadays is very much in the position of the captain of a battleship. Although the father of his official family, he nevertheless occupies an aloof eminence. He has not to dine in solitary state, but just the same he is a person apart. He represents his Sovereign, and for that reason is forced to surround himself with circumstances of state, with barriers against indiscretion, with social barbed wire entanglements which are not required by the ordinary politician or even statesman.

An Ambassador is very much more really the personal representative of his Sovereign than is imagined by the general public. He constantly has to report directly to the King, and to convey personal messages to the head of the State to which he is accredited. Every action he performs, every house he visits, every friendship he makes, is therefore invested with special significance. He has to be further above criticism than Cæsar's wife, and more royalist than the King. He can never let himself go, and, like the clergyman pitied by the child, does not even get his Sundays off. Moreover, as well as being the personal representative of the King, he has to be that anonymous freak, the personification of his country's policy.

An ordinary humdrum Ambassador-and Heaven knows

there have been too many of them-acts up to the specification without too much selfrepression, moves through his daily round of ceremonial duties with distinction, carries out his task as royal postman with becoming dignity, retires full of honours, and is forgotten by his grateful countrymen about a week afterwards. But the really big man manages by sheer force of character to remain himself amid all the flummery of diplomatic existence, and succeeds in putting flesh upon the skeleton of traditional policy, and in sending the blood of reality coursing through its veins.

Such a man was Lord Bertie, and it will be a thousand pities if the extracts from his diary, edited by Lady Algernon Gordon Lennox, are not as quickly as possible followed up by a more serious picture of a great servant of the public. Naturally it is far too soon for official archives to yield up the true story of the many occasions, both before the war and during the war, when his intervention carried decisive weight in European affairs. Lady Algernon Gordon Lennox would have been better advised to wait until all these materials for a fitting memorial to Lord Bertie were available, than to have published a book consisting of nothing but the random thoughts of an old man jotted down at the end of the day in front of his study fire in dressing-gown and slippers. A picture thus drawn