Dale Kynnersley--such is the ignorance of the new generation--would have no sense of the allusion.

He would shake his head and say, "Dotty, poor old chap, dotty!" I can hear him.

And if, in order to prepare him, I gave him a copy of the "Meditations," he would fling the book across the room and qualify Marcus Aurelius as a "rotter." Dale is a very shrewd fellow, and will make an admirable legislator when his time comes.

Although his highest intellectual recreation is reiterated attendance at the musical comedy that has caught his fancy for the moment and his favourite literature the sporting pages of the daily papers, he has a curious feline pounce on the salient facts of a political situation, and can thread the mazes of statistics with the certainty of a Hampton Court guide.

His enthusiastic researches (on my behalf) into pauper lunacy are remarkable in one so young.