year before the war broke out, while he was still bitterly hated by
the Conservatives, I was visiting him at his Welsh home near
Llanystumdwy and he asked me what I thought of the district. I said it
was all very beautiful, as indeed it was. I emphasized my appreciation
by saying that the visitors at the big hotel at Criccieth near by were
one and all enchanted. They were nearly all Conservatives, I pointed
out, and there was just one fly in their ointment. "I know it," said
Lloyd George, vivaciously, with a quick twinkle in his eye. "Here's a
bay like the Bay of Naples, God's great mountains behind, beautiful
woods, and green meadows, and trickling streams--everything the heart
of man can desire, and in the midst of it all HE lives." He paused and
deepened his voice. "Satan in the Garden of Eden," he said. It was
just his twist of humor, but it told a story. Now for the companion
picture. The last time I saw Lloyd George was one dark evening in the
December which has just gone by. It had been a day of big political
happenings; the Asquith Government had resigned, Bonar Law, the
Conservative leader, had been asked by the King to form a Ministry and
had said he could not do so. Lloyd George's name was being bandied
about. In those few fateful hours Britain was without a Government.
At seven o'clock I was at the entrance of the War Office at Whitehall.
Through the dark street an automobile dashed up. The door was opened,
and a silk-hatted man stepped out and passed rapidly into the War
Office, and then the little group of bystanders noticed that the
footman at the door of the automobile was wearing the royal livery.
The silk-hatted visitor was obviously a messenger from King George.
Three minutes later the War Office doors swung open and two men came
hurrying out. The first was the King's messenger, the second was Lloyd
George. The latter's shoulders were hunched with haste, his hat was
pressed deep and irregularly over his forehead, his face, set hard, was
canted forward. He almost scrambled into the conveyance, and three
seconds later the automobile was going at top speed for Buckingham
Palace. The King had sent for Lloyd George to ask him to become his
Prime Minister.

F. D.

_January, 1917._

LLOYD GEORGE

I

THE VILLAGE COBBLER WHO HELPED THE BRITISH EMPIRE

One day in the year 1866 a middle-aged cobbler named Richard Lloyd,
occupying a tiny cottage in the village of Llanystumdwy in