300 LIFE OF SIR JOHN LUBBOCK ch. 



Trade. If it were so I believe it would have been an 

 advantage to both countries, but on that I express no 

 opinion. 



During October he made a considerable re- 

 covery, w^ent several times to the City and en- 

 tertained guests at High Elms. Amongst them 

 vsras his old friend Lord Courtney, who told a 

 story of John Burns taking an American and a 

 Canadian to the terrace of the House of Commons. 

 They spoke contemptuously of the Thames as 

 compared with the Mississippi and the St. 

 Lawrence. " You're wrong," Burns said. " The 

 Mississippi's a great mass of dirty water, and the 

 St. Lawrence is a great mass of clean water, but 

 the Thames is liquid history ! " 



Another guest at High Elms this month was 

 M. Boustany, who had translated some of his 

 books into Arabic. He told Lord Avebury that 

 The Pleasures of Life was the first book ever 

 published in the Soudan. He printed three 

 thousand copies in Arabic of The Use of Life, and 

 was at that time preparing a second edition. 



It is rather interesting to speculate how the 

 Arabic translator contrived to curb his vivacious 

 Oriental Pegasus, with his high-flying metaphors, 

 down to the placid measure in which Lord 

 Avebury writes. The followmg is a specimen of 

 this translator's letters and of the magnificent 

 idiom into which, presumably, he had to recon- 

 struct the English prose : 



Dear Sir — My globe has been rotating and revolving 

 for several months since the splendid visitor of our 

 firmament " showed up " as a rainbow in disguise, 

 bearing the immortal name of a mortal being — I refer 

 to the " Song of May." It is a fact, My Lord, that I 



