When told that we were merely discussing the rival merits of two
schools in England, they were more than ever confirmed in their opinion
that all English people were hopelessly mad.

To one like myself, to whom it has fallen to visit almost every country
on the face of the globe, there is always a tinge of melancholy in
revisiting the familiar High Street of Harrow. It is like returning to
the starting-point at the conclusion of a long race. The externals
remain unchanged. Outwardly, the New Schools, the Chapel, the Vaughan
Library, and the Head-Master's House all wear exactly the same aspect
that they bore half a century ago. They have not changed, and the
ever-renewed stream of young life flows through the place as joyously
as it did fifty years ago. But....

"Oh, the great days in the distance enchanted,
Days of fresh air, in the rain and the sun."

At times the imagination is apt to play tricks and to set back the
hands of the clock, until one pictures oneself again in a short jacket
and Eton collar, going up to school, with a pile of books hugged under
the left arm, and the intervening half-century wiped out. But, as they
would put it in Ireland, these lucky, fresh-faced youngsters of to-day
have their futures in front of them, not behind them. Then it is that
Howson's words, wedded to John Farmer's haunting refrain, come back to
the mind--

"Yet the time may come as the years go by,
When your heart will thrill
At the thought of 'The Hill'
And the day that you came, so strange and shy."

CHAPTER V

Mme. Ducros--A Southern French country town--"Tartarin de
Tarascon"--His prototypes at Nyons--M. Sisteron the roysterer--The
Southern French--An octogenarian pesteur--French
industry--"Bone-shakers"--A wonderful
"Cordon-bleu"--"Slop-basin"--French legal procedure--The
bons-vivants--The merry French judges--La gaiete francaise--Delightful
excursions--Some sleepy old towns--Orange and Avignon--M. Thiers'
ingenious cousin--Possibilities--French political situation in
1874--The Comte de Chambord--Some French characteristics--High
intellectual level--Three days in a Trappist Monastery--Details of life
there--The Arian heresy--Silkworm culture--Tendencies of French to
complicate details--Some examples--Cicadas in London.

As it had already been settled that I was to enter the Diplomatic
Service, my father very wisely determined that I should leave Harrow as
soon as I was seventeen