He smoked with me, and to prove that he was not a total abstainer he drank my health in a glass of port wine--very good wine.

It was Coombe that did it--its peaceful life, isolated from a distracting world in that hollow hill, and the marvellous purity of its air.

"Sitting there on my lawn," he said, "you are six hundred feet above the sea, although in a hollow four hundred feet deep." It was an ideal open-air room, round and green, with the sky for a roof.

In winter it was sometimes very cold, and after a heavy fall of snow the scene was strange and impressive from the tiny village set in its stupendous dazzling white bowl.

Not only on those rare arctic days, but at all times it was wonderfully quiet.