CS

And so we come to an end. And how can an author do better than to quote
Ibn Khallikan's own concluding words, which, though written so long ago
about a biographical dictionary, may be borrowed by all literary hands
as palliation for whatever shortcomings their work may have?--"If any
well-informed person remark, in examining this book, that it contains
faults, he should not hasten to blame me, for I always aimed at being
exact, as far as I could judge; and, besides, God has allowed no book to
be faultless except His noble _Koran_."

=DIVERSIONS=

DIVERSIONS

Nurses

The conversation turning, as, round English fires, it often does, on the
peculiarities of an old nurse of the family, I was struck again by the
tenderness and kindness, shot through with humour, that are always
evoked by this particular retrospective mood. I would even say that
people are at their best when they are remembering their nurses. To
recall one's parents is often to touch chords that vibrate too
disturbingly; but these foster parents, chosen usually with such strange
carelessness but developing often into true guardian angels, with good
influences persisting through life--when, in reminiscent vein, we set
them up, one against the other, can call from the speakers qualities
that they normally may conspicuously lack. Quite dull people can become
interesting and whimsical as their thoughts wander back through the
years to the day when old Martha or old Jane, or whoever it was, moulded
them and scolded them and broke the laws of grammar. Quite hard people
can then melt a little. Quite stern people can smile.

And quite funny people can become intensely funny, as I have melancholy
reason to know, for, listening to these new anecdotes, I recalled the
last occasion on which the fruitful theme of a Nanna's oddities had been
developed; when the speaker was that fascinating athlete and gentleman,
E. B., a gallant officer with a gift of mimicry as notable as his sense
of fun and his depth of feeling, who, chiefly for the amusement of two
children, but equally--or even more--to the delight of us older ones,
not only gave us certain of his old nurse's favourite sayings, in her
own voice, but reconstructed her features as he did so. All good mimicry
astonishes and entertains me, and this was especially good, for it
triumphed over the disabilities of a captain's uniform. Something very
curious and pretty, and, through all our laugh