es--and a gossamer-blue veil of haze
stained the hills between which the shining river ran. If the social
revolution, or evolution, takes place, one wonders what will become of
this long-cherished beauty.

I venture to dwell upon one more experience of that week-end party.
The Friday evening of my arrival I was met at the station, not by a
limousine with a chauffeur and footman, but by a young woman with a
taxicab--one of the many reminders that a war is going on. London had
been reeking in a green-yellow fog, but here the mist was white, and
through it I caught glimpses of the silhouettes of stately trees in a
park, and presently saw the great house with its clock-tower looming up
before me. A fire was crackling in the hall, and before it my hostess
was conversing amusedly with a well-known sculptor--a sculptor typical
of these renaissance times, large, full-blooded, with vigorous opinions
on all sorts of matters.

"A lecturer is coming down from London to talk to the wounded in the
amusement-hall of the hospital," our hostess informed us. "And you both
must come and speak too."

The three of us got into the only motor of which the establishment now
boasts, a little runabout using a minimum of "petrol," and she guided
us rapidly by devious roads through the fog until a blur of light
proclaimed the presence of a building, one of some score or more built
on the golf-course by the British Government. I have not space hereto
describe that hospital, which is one of the best in England; but it must
be observed that its excellence and the happiness of its inmates are
almost wholly due to the efforts of the lady who now conducted us across
the stage of the amusement-hall, where all the convalescents who
could walk or who could be rolled thither in chairs were gathered. The
lecturer had not arrived. But the lady of the manor seated herself at
the speaker's table, singling out Scotch wits in the audience--for
whom she was more than a match--while the sculptor and I looked on and
grinned and resisted her blandishments to make speeches. When at last
the lecturer came he sat down informally on the table with one foot
hanging in the air and grinned, too, at her bantering but complimentary
introduction. It was then I discovered for the first time that he was
one of the best educational experts of that interesting branch of the
British Government, the Department of Reconstruction, whose business
it is to teach the convalescents the