been made about him before my time, when Benn rose calmly in his place and said: "I assure the honourable and gallant member that he is mistaken, all I said was that if the question was then ripe for decision, what must it be now?" and sat down amid general laughter. Harry Marks that very doubtful financier who had the honour of being presented at Court by Arthur Balfour was for some reason one of our members and used to entertain us in the Smoking Room. Bobbie Phillimore was our youngest member as he was afterwards the youngest member of the House of Commons. In my first Council I sat next to John Lewis, the draper, until he was removed to prison by the tipstaff for insisting upon saying what he really thought about Lord Howard de Walden as a landlord : the sturdy old boy went to prison and would not apologize for months. Other names that come back to me are those of Dickinson the devoted worker, Lord Monkswell, that wonderful veteran Sir Algernon West, Sidney Webb, Mark Mayhew, the motorist and among the Moderates Lord Onslow, Melville Beechcroft, Westmacott, Lord Peel while among the Labour men I can only recall John Burns, Will Crooks and Steadman. I could not bear the Moderates, their policy always seemed to me narrow and selfish, their methods contemptible and vulgar, and their outlook that of a corrupt vestry. London is both suffering and paying to-day in its water supply as a consequence of their short-sighted policy in supporting the vested interests of the companies, as also it suffers for want of river steamboats and many other municipal amenities. Still it gets the government it deserves for its apathy and want of civic spirit.

A

CHAPTER XXVI

LAKE TAHOE

YEAR or so after the judgment of the House of Lords which left my matrimonial affairs in an unsatisfactory state I fought Hammersmith at the L.C.C. Election, and among my most prominent supporters was a lady called Mrs. Somerville. She was a well-known member of the Pioneer Club and an active supporter of Women's Suffrage and represented her Ward on the Hammersmith Board of Guardians. I was warned that she was a person of importance in the constituency and that I must not fail to satisfy her as to my soundness on the feminist claims. I did, I believe, succeed in satisfying her and I often met her canvassing and working for me with a friend Miss A. also a member of the Pioneer Club. We seemed to take to each other at first sight, and she paid me two or three visits at Amberley Cottage accompanied by her friend who acted as a most sympathetic gooseberry. It was not long before we both discovered that we liked each other more than a little, but there were difficulties. As a matter of fact, on principle Mollie would not be satisfied without a marriage, but she would be satisfied with an American marriage, even though it would not be binding in England. After considerable discussion we decided to seek an American divorce as it did not appear possible that either Mabel or I could divorce the other.

I might mention that we had been watching Mabel Edith at Bray, and although we were perfectly satisfied that both she and her mother were earning their living by men it was impossible to obtain any proof of this. There was an arrangement that all the servants should sleep in a separate building adjoining the house which caused them to be unaware of what went on at night, and there was also the difficulty that she was always with her mother. As Lockwood pointed out when we submitted the evidence to him: "You would never get a British jury to believe that a mother was a party to her daughter's adultery when it was a case merely of

inference and not of direct evidence." Neither could she ever divorce me because both cruelty and desertion had already been negatived in legal proceedings. These are the beauties of our English law.

The eccentricity of the route which we selected to reach America and of our wanderings after landing was no less than that of our purpose. It was the 4th of July, an appropriate day to inaugurate a visit to the United States and not less appropriate to our personal object. The evening train from Waterloo took us to Southampton, and the night boat from there took us to Havre. We had a very favourable journey across the Atlantic in La Bretagne, one of the C.G.T. boats, keeping up a steady pace of 18 knots.

We had slipped away silently and the whole thing was kept very quiet. It was therefore rather a shock to me on the day after I landed at New York to run into my old friend Burland in Wall Street. All I could do was to swear him to secrecy for eight months, and he faithfully observed this. We hurried out West but my experience with lawyers of Chicago was not very favourable. I visited one of the most eminent in order to get definite and reliable information as to the divorce laws of the United States. He received me in his shirt sleeves in his private room, with two doors wide open to adjoining rooms. He seemed surprised when I stated my business was private and informed me curtly that I could shut the door if I liked. (Subsequent experience in American novels has led me to the conclusion that the only kind of business which is considered private in America is the giving and receiving of bribes.) After long discussion and a second visit, he gave me his considered opinion that in the Territory of Arizona no residence was required to bring an alien within the jurisdiction of the local Divorce Courts, and in the State of North Dakota a residence of only three months. For this valuable information he charged ten dollars, and I subsequently ascertained that a residence of twelve months was necessary to give jurisdiction either in Arizona or in North Dakota.

We landed at Flagstaff from the train with some trepidation. It was reported to be one of the "toughest " places on God's earth, to have more saloons in proportion to its population than any other town, and we had no conception as to what sort of size it would be, and what sort of hotel accommodation we should get. Our doubts on the last point were soon set at rest. We found the New Bank Hotel not all bad, and the manager and his wife, both of whom were Californians, attentive and agreeable. Hot baths even were obtainable on a curious little wooden platform at the back of the hotel

at 2s. a bath. Flagstaff, to our surprise, contained some two or three stone buildings, and was not quite so small as we expected to find it. Foot locomotion was rendered possible by the system of elevated wooden side-walks peculiar to the West, but even so it was neither a desirable nor a safe place to walk about in after dark, owing to sudden terminations of the side-walks, and unexpected pools in the middle of the roads. Flagstaff has two trains a day, the West-bound going to San Francisco at 9.28 a.m. and the Eastbound going to Chicago at 10.40 a.m. One of our regular morning amusements was to sit on the balcony and watch these trains when they were not too late. The station lay in a hollow with the line rising sharply on both sides of it and it was a fine sight to see the powerful American locomotives hauling a long train of cars up the grade without any apparent effort.

On the afternoon of our arrival we strolled out to read in a pine clump which afforded a scanty shade. We had the pleasure of watching a woodpecker pecking at the trees, seeing lizards running over the stones and stalking a very inquisitive Rock Squirrel, which allowed me to make a stealthy approach to within 4 or 5 feet. The animal is smaller than our squirrel with a less bushy tail and black bars along the back. Our natural history entertainment was wound up by a startlingly sudden fusillade of Katydids which frightened Mollie out of her wits.

The trip to the Grand Cañon of the Colorado is made by a seventyfive mile stage drive from Flagstaff, so off we went. The hotel is situated on the very edge of the Grand Cañon, and immediately on our arrival we rushed to the edge to see it. We were faced by an immense chasm illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, so wide that we could not see the bottom from where we stood, filled up in the middle with plateaux, pinnacles and smaller heights; composed of what looked like striated layers of sand of various colours; but mostly a wonderful pink in the sunset light, for all the world like those glass bottles full of coloured sand that are brought back home from the seaside to adorn the homes of trippers; no sign of vegetation, no sign of water, save in the far depths a muddy trickle said to be the Colorado River. It is in fact thirteen miles wide at the top and one mile deep. The whole thing looked like some curious panorama or a magic lantern picture, unreal and unsubstantial; the eye refused to take in its size, its depth, and its solid existence. The bank we were on was well wooded; on the other side of the Cañon stretched away a coloured plateau for miles and miles, rising again

into strange barren striated hills, and known as the Painted Desert.

We looked at the Cañon again next morning from Grand View Point, which gives a better view of it; we saw it several times both morning and evening from the hotel, we descended into it and came up again, and the sum total of our impressions came to this: it did not strike us as “a harmonious picture, as a beautiful flower or as a sublime and complete expression of all that art has striven to show," as the railway folders put it. It did strike us as a wonderful freak of nature, immense, astounding and mysterious, but above all as sombre, gloomy and awe-inspiring. Possibly those who have seen it often, often descended into it, seen it under various aspects of light and shade, seen it by moonlight, may come to find it beautiful and fascinating; to us it remained a kind of gloomy horror which we were glad to have seen but which we had no liking for and no wish to see again.

The descent is by means of a trail, a great part of which is artificial. We had decided to camp at the bottom, and our expedition consisted of ourselves and guide on three horses and a pack animal to carry our blankets and provisions. Ladies have to ride astride on this trail, and Mollie had borrowed from the hotel a wonderful pair of bloomers in which she looked very well. Our guide was a one-eyed man named Joe, who turned out to have a considerable fund of humour. We set out soon after nine o'clock, accompanied by the Bennetts, the two most delightful Americans that we met on our tour, and the rest of their party, making a cavalcade of nearly twenty horses altogether. On the first part of the trail which is steep we were formed in line while a kinematograph picture was taken by Mr. Bennett for subsequent exhibition in Chicago as we understood. The next half mile of the trail was fairly level, but to me the most sickening and nerve-shaking of the whole journey. It wound as a narrow ribbon round the face of a precipice about 200 feet below the top, while a slip of three yards from the trail would have precipitated horse and rider down a sheer drop of two or three thousand feet. Further on the trail became in one part so steep that we got off and walked; then crossed on to a middle pinnacle by a bridge, partly natural and partly artificial, and again descended by a staircase cut in the living rock. Here Mollie lost her nerve and her temper, for, although there were no precipitous edges, the trail itself was very steep and she feared her horse more than she feared the Cañon. However, a little encouragement both spirituous