1912] Sasanoff, Grey and Kitchener at Balmoral 395 



lapses, seeing the cowardice he and his party have shown, Dillon only 

 excepted, in abandoning the cause of India, Persia, and Egypt, and 

 backing up Grey and the Whigs in all their iniquitous doings abroad in 

 payment for Irish Home Rule. It will serve them right if they are 

 choused out of their thirty pieces of silver after all. As far as the 

 larger world of Asia is concerned it will be no great misfortune, seeing 

 that the Irish Parliamentary Party has gone over soul and body to 

 our execrable Whig Government and richly deserves its discomfiture. 

 It is time I should cease to worry myself with the world's ways and 

 the ways of the British Empire and the ways of Ireland. 



" 15th Sept. — George Wyndham writes a long letter from Clouds, 

 describing a visit he has just paid to Cockermouth Castle. It re- 

 minds me of by-gone times when Francis and I stayed there some 

 fifty years ago with Percy and Madeline, George's parents, when they 

 first married. My recollection of it is of an ancient stone fortress, 

 rough and unfurnished, without covering to the stone walls, and with 

 curious mediaeval conveniences still in use, amongst others one pro- 

 jecting from the castle wall, which had a clear drop of perhaps a 

 hundred feet down into the Derwent river below. I remember, too, 

 how one day being out shooting in a covert below the castle, a cock 

 pheasant which had been winged and had fallen beyond the river, 

 which is there very wide and swift, deliberately took to the water 

 and swam across the river back to its own side. We went once or 

 twice to shoot grouse on Skiddaw, but there was more walking than 

 sport. George, in his letters, talks of himself as being now a country 

 squire, with the prospect of ' conceivably being Minister of War, when 

 his side comes into power again.' 



"20th Sept. — The papers announce a visit to be paid to the King 

 at Balmoral by the Russian Minister of Foreign affairs, Sazanoff, 

 Grey, and Kitchener, a black combination. Belloc declares positively 

 that the Home Rule Bill is to be abandoned and it really looks like it. 

 My ' Land War ' has so far been very well received, and yesterday 

 there was a laudatory review of it in the ' Nation.' It is probably the 

 last prose work I shall publish, though there may be more than one 

 posthumous volume of my diaries. 



" 22nd Sept. (Sunday). — Dr. Renner, a quite black West African 

 from Sierra Leone, is here for the week-end, having been brought by 

 Miss Howsin, an M.D. who is interested in the future of his race, 

 and looks to Islam as the best means to its salvation in Africa, though 

 not himself a Mohammedan. He talks no native language, and his 

 mastery of English is very imperfect, though he is a well-educated 

 man. His name, he tells us, in the Fanti tongue is Aouna. He gets 

 £550 a year a chief of the Native Medical Staff at Sierra Leone, but 



