104 Winston Churchill [ I0 /04 



" gth Aug. — Went by appointment to see Winston Churchill at his 

 rooms in Mount Street. He is astonishingly like his father in manners 

 and ways, and the whole attitude of his mind. He has just come in 

 from playing polo, a short, sturdy little man with a twinkle in his 

 eye, reminding me especially of the Randolph of twenty years ago. 

 He took out his father's letters which I had left with him six weeks 

 ago, from a tin box, and read them to me aloud while I explained the 

 allusions in them, and gave him a short account of the political adven- 

 tures of the early eighties in which Randolph and I had been connected. 

 There is something touching about the fidelity with which he continues 

 to espouse his father's cause and his father's quarrels. He has been 

 working double shifts this session in Parliament, and looks, I fancy, 

 to a leadership of the Liberal Party, and an opportunity of full ven- 

 geance on those who caused his father's death. I promised to let him 

 see extracts from my diaries of 1884-1885. 



" Mary Milbanke is with me at Newbuildings. She is much en- 

 livened and improved by her trip to the West Indies last winter. I 

 am very fond of her, having acted as a parent to her from the time 

 she was a child. 



" 14th Aug. — Fernycroft. I drove here, starting on the nth, with 

 Miss Lawrence and the two boys, Alfred Kensett and Harry Holman, 

 taking tents and camp equipments with us. We went by Fernhurst 

 and Midhurst, and nearly had an accident going up the steep hill at 

 Holly Coomb, for we were overloaded, and it was only by putting the 

 four horses we had been driving in pairs together with the four in 

 hand harness we had with us that I managed with a rush to get at 

 full gallop to the top. There had been heavy rain and the road was 

 much broken up by it, and it was touch and go whether they could do 

 it. Holly Coomb is a romantic place with great oak woods, where 

 they used to boast in former times that they could kill a woodcock 

 every day of the year. 



" I have had a long talk with Meynell, who is staying here, about 

 Roman politics and Catholic prospects. He tells me the true cause of 

 quarrel between the Vatican and France is that Combes has all along 

 intended to do away with the Concordat, and that Merry del Val is 

 young and imprudent. The first quarrel raised by Merry as to the 

 French President's visit was so ill-chosen that it raised protests every- 

 where in the Catholic world and so had to be abandoned. The other 

 quarrel has been forced upon the Pope. The Bishops of Laval and 

 Dijon had two or three years ago been denounced at Rome, the one for 

 immorality with a Carmelite Abbess, the other for being affiliated to a 

 Freemasons' Lodge. He had been seen in plain clothes coming out of 

 a house where the Masons were holding a meeting, and at Rome his 

 action was connected with the story of there being a secret plot, sup- 



