compliments.

He often averred that no one could amuse him as I did. He laughed once for
half-an-hour on end when I said, "It takes a Liberal to be a Tory;" and on
another occasion when I said, "The essence of Home Rule is, like charity,
that it begins abroad." Nothing but the circumstance that he was already
happily married prevented him from proposing to me.

Mr. Sadrock is now to many people only a name; but in his day he was a
force to compare with which we have at this moment only one statesman and
he is temporarily out of office.

The odd thing is that if the ordinary person were to be asked what Mr.
Sadrock was famous for, he would probably reply, For his devotion to HOMER
and the Established Church. But the joke is that when I was with him in
1902 he was frivolous on both these subjects. It was, I remember, in the
private room at the House of Commons set apart for Prime Ministers, to
which, being notoriously so socially couth, I always had a private key--the
only one ever given to a woman--and he was more than usually delightful.

This is what was said:--

_MR. SADROCK_ (_mixing himself an egg nogg_). Will you join me?

_MYSELF._ No, thank you. But I like to see you applying yourself to
Subsidiary Studies to the Art of Butler.

_MR. SADROCK_ (_roaring with laughter_). That's very good. Some day you
must put your best things into a book.

_MYSELF._ You bet.

_MR. SADROCK._ I wonder why it is that you make me so frank. It is your
wonderful sympathetic understanding, I suppose. I long to tell you
something now.

_MYSELF_ (_affecting not to care_). Do. I am secrecy itself.

_MR. SADROCK._ Would it surprise you to know that I am privily a Dissenter?
Do you know that I often steal away in a false beard to attend the services
of Hard-Shell Baptists and Plymouth Brethren?

_MYSELF._ I hope I am no longer capable of feeling anything so _demode_ as
surprise.

_MR. SADROCK._ And that I prefer _Robert Elsmere_ to the _Iliad_?

_MYSELF._ May I print those declarations in my book?

_MR. SADROCK._ Some day, yes, but not yet, not yet.

* * * * *

MR. SADROCK AND NONCONFORMITY. _To the Editor of_ "_The Monday Times_."

SIR,--I find it necessary, in the interests of truth and of respect for the
memory of my uncle, Mr. Sadrock, to contest the accuracy of the Margotist's
report of conversations with him in 1902. To begin with, my uncle died in
1898, four years before the alleged