1907] Thompson Curses the Wasps 185 



which will bring matters to a crisis. Our Government is faced at last 

 with a question which will go far to break up the Empire. If it proves 

 anything to Radicals it will prove that their old doctrine is the right 

 one, namely, that the Colonies are no strength to England, but a weak- 

 ness. George III was logical in his day, when he insisted on govern- 

 ing North America as well as holding it under the Crown. It is quite 

 illogical to hold it and to be powerless to govern, as our Whigs are 

 trying to do. The result will be that we English shall be responsible 

 for all the evil done in the Colonies, and shall become demoralized by 

 consenting to it. We shall have to choose very soon between the 

 Colonial Empire and our Indian Empire. We shall try to keep both, 

 and please God we shall lose both. 



' Thompson goes on in a half alive state at David's, apparently 

 content with his existence purely negative. He takes laudanum, David 

 reports, daily, and sleeps at night with a stertorous sound. At noon 

 every day I send a vehicle for him, and he joins us here at luncheon, 

 very feeble and quite silent, except it be on some very trivial subject. 

 He seems incapable of bringing his mind to bear on any complex 

 thought, and sits through the afternoon with a volume of Dickens' 

 ' Martin Chuzzlewit,' sometimes held upside down in his hand, which 

 he does not read, nodding, and three parts asleep, like a very aged man. 

 He seems happy, however, and I do not disturb him, nor does he ask 

 that anyone should talk to him." 



We lunched at that time always in the Jubilee garden, where he was 

 much annoyed by the wasps, which were particularly numerous that 

 summer, even to the extent that on one occasion he cursed them for 

 the drunken brutes they were. He used to appeal to me to help him 

 when they got into his wine. " Will you please kill this wasp for 

 me, I cannot do it, I have never killed anything in my life." At last 

 one bit him and he had his wrist bound up in lint with a strong solution 

 of ammonia, and going to sleep soon after it raised a blister which re- 

 mained an interest to him till he died, wearing the rag, as saints are 

 represented carrying the instruments of their martyrdom. It has re- 

 mained a legend here, but I do not vouch for its authenticity as a 

 miracle, though it is a fact, that for three years after this there were 

 no wasps in the garden. It was on the long wicker sofa, the same 

 that was my brother's during his last illness, that he was usually laid 

 out to sleep through the afternoon in the New Room on the ground 

 floor where his portrait now hangs. 



"21st Sept. — To London, and lunched with Horace Rumbold, and 

 he talked again about the Crown Prince Rudolph's death, giving me 

 new details. ' Rudi Hoyos,' he said, ' was a charming man of about 

 fifty, very popular in Vienna. The girl's mother had been a Baltazzi, 

 married to a diplomatist of the minor nobility almost bourgeois. The 



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