The Rev. E. A. Aldridge 145 



ment of an M.P., " Well said ; you answered him quite right." 

 Which showed that the good M.P.'s heart was in the right place 

 even if his grammar was not. 



To all who can hunt, Mr. Aldridge says, " Do so, and keep 

 young." Hunting in winter and mountain-climbing in summer 

 have kept him surprisingly young and fit, and enabled him to 

 stand a period of hard service in France that has knocked up 

 many a younger man. 



One impossibly frosty day with the Vine he had a fall 

 through his horse slipping on ice, and subsequently slithered off 

 rather unexpectedly while negotiating a jump. On the way 

 home he was in high spirits, maintaining that he had extracted 

 more fun out of a poor day's sport than anyone else by his 

 various catastrophes. " Oh," said one of his companions, 

 addressing the company at large by way of excusing his hilarity, 

 " Aldridge is still only a boy ; he was born so, and will remain so 

 till the end of the chapter." I think that to have that said 

 about one late in life must be pleasant. 



" No one knows better than I do how difficult it is to be a 

 good country parson," he once wrote to me. " And I claim 

 the parson's privilege of not always practising what I preach." 



He was the first in Hannington village to volunteer for 

 service in August, 1914, but the villagers were not long in 

 following his example and won the prize for the greatest pro- 

 portional number of recruits. As I have said, he served as a 

 doctor in the R.A.M.C. He was with the Brigade of Guards 

 Hospital, and also with the Guards Division at Loos, where he 

 was slightly wounded, and on the Somme. From them he went 

 to the 12th Lancers, and later to the famous Scottish Division. 

 He is still on active service as I write these lines, and doubtless 

 working hard and gaining fresh experiences. 



