io6 Sportsmen Parsons in Peace and War 



transcend us in many things —hard work, secular education, and 

 inventive genius— but found it difficult to live up to their 

 strenuousness when on arrival at midnight in an hotel in New 

 York he was invited through the keyhole of his bedroom door 

 to commence a conversation with a gentleman outside who 

 " bid him discourse " just when prepared to become a companion 

 of the bath. Some of the enquiries were complicated and 

 required more consideration than the opportunity seemed to 

 suggest ! The interrogator asked in rapid succession what the 

 Dean thought of New York City, Oliver Cromwell, and the 

 intermediate state ! 



He had a very amusing story he told extremely well of a 

 dinner-party he went to at the house of an aged lady who was 

 accustomed to have a hot foot-warmer placed under the table 

 to keep her toes warm. The guests entered the dining-room 

 while the footman was still under the table putting the foot- 

 warmer in position, and the people sat down. Hearing a slight 

 commotion under the table, the old lady took it to be the pet 

 retriever, and called, " Rollo, Rollo ! come out, Rollo ! " and 

 affectionately patted the agonised man's head as it emerged 

 from under the table-cloth ! 



Another, story he tells in his own Memoirs is of a clergyman 

 who observed that the congregation was large and that there 

 was only one collection-plate, so he told a rustic parishioner to 

 run over to the vicarage, enter the dining-room by the open 

 French windows, and bring one of the plates he would find on 

 the sideboard. This the yokel did, and took his plate up one 

 side of the church while the usual plate was taken up the other. 

 At the end of the collection he came to the vicar and whispered, 

 " I took the plate all up the aisle, but nobody would take one." 

 The plate was full of biscuits ! 



I think most people have heard the one about a bygone Lady 

 Cork who was so much moved by the sermon one Sunday that 

 she borrowed a sovereign from the man sitting next her to put 

 in the collection. The sovereign, however, went into Lady 

 Cork's collection, as when the plate came along she could 

 neither bring herself to put it in nor return it to the man ! 



Mr. Hole's university career was like that of thousands of 

 others. He went up determined to work hard, and read 

 furiously ; then he read steadily ; then read with weariness, 



