CHAPTER NINETEEN 



EUROPE ONCE MORE 



OUR steamer was the City of Chester, of the now defunct Inman 

 Line, an old ship and none too luxurious, which I was to meet 

 again in very different circumstances at the close of the Spanish War. We 

 landed at Liverpool and took the usual "American tour" — Chester, 

 Leamington, Oxford and their surroundings. Then followed a fortnight 

 in London, when I took up again the work in the British Museum, which 

 I had laid aside in 1879 on going to Cambridge. Sloane had spent the 

 preceding winter in Paris at work upon his monumental Life of 

 Napoleon and I found him ensconced in a house in London, He was 

 in a state of perturbation, for he had not had a word or a line from 

 Dr. Patton since the latter's election to the presidency. This silence 

 Sloane interpreted as deHberate and meaning that his resignation would 

 be acceptable. I, knowing our new President better, believed it to be 

 merely an oversight and so I cabled Pyne to urge that Dr. Patton 

 should write to Sloane. This, of course, I did without saying anything 

 of it to any one and the result must have been favourable, though I 

 never heard. 



I was invited to dine at the Savile Club by that eminent zoologist 

 E. Ray Lankester, who was subsequently knighted and made Director 

 of the British Museum of Natural History. Lankester was very un- 

 popular among his British colleagues and some of his subordinates at 

 the Museum fairly loathed him; the things they told me about him 

 cannot be repeated here. On the other hand, I always Hked him and 

 he was uniformly kind and courteous to me. On the occasion at the 

 Savile Club, we took the "house dinner" and sat at a long table with 

 twenty-five or thirty other members, Lankester at one end of the table 

 and I next to him. In connection with something which I have forgot- 

 ten, the conversation turned on EngHsh beer, on which my host deliv- 

 ered a glowing eulogy. He declared that it was the finest and purest 

 beer in the world, that nothing but malt and hops was ever put into it, 



C 205 ] 



