s that, though I was a perfect little imp, I began
with writing hymns. In fact," said she, as she showed me a letter which
her father had written to a friend when she was seven years of age, "my
father had to check my early attempts in that direction." I read with
some amusement what Lord Houghton had written about his little daughter,
and I transcribe his words the more readily that they appear to me to
give a glimpse into the mind of the poet and of his ideas on the origin
and making of poetry. He writes:

[Illustration: GROUP OF A.D.C.'S.]

"The second little girl has developed into a verse writer of a very
curious ability. She began theologically and wrote hymns, which I soon
checked on observing that she put together words and sentences out of
the sacred verse she knew, and set her to write about things she saw and
observed. What she now produces is very like the verse of William Blake,
and containing many images that she could never have read of. She
cannot write, but she dictates them to her elder sister, who is
astonished at the phenomenon. We, of course, do not let her see that it
is anything surprising, and the chances are that it goes off as she gets
older and knows more. The lyrical faculty in many nations seems to
belong to a childish condition of mind, and to disappear with experience
and knowledge."

[Illustration: DEBUTANTES ARRIVING.]

The conversation drifted into a discussion on the present system of
interviewing, and Mrs. Henniker told me, with much amusement, of a
reporter of the _St. Louis Republic_ who called upon her father when he
visited America, who, indeed, would not be denied, but forced his way
into Lord Houghton's bedroom, where he found him actually in bed, and
who, in relating what had passed between them, expressed his pleasure at
having seen "a real live lord," and recorded his opinion that he was
"as easy and plain as an old shoe!"

[Illustration: ASCENDING THE STAIRCASE.]

Lord Houghton must have been a welcome guest in a country where humour
and the capacity for after-dinner speeches are so warmly appreciated as
in America. No more brilliant after-dinner speaker ever existed than
Richard Monckton Milnes, and the capacity for public speech, which was
such a characteristic of the first Lord Houghton, exists no less
gracefully in his poetic and now Vice-Regal son; but it was, perhaps, as
a humorist that the father specially excelled, and in glancing through
the many letters and