One night in February we had a great surprise. We had had the heaviest snowstorm for the whole winter, and the snow was from two to six feet deep. Charlie had just gone to bed, Stanley and I were in the middle of our evening game of chess, and Mollie was sitting reading in her red felt slippers, when we heard a bell outside. At first we thought it was some of Mrs. Short's cows in our field, but when it was followed by the wail of a child we all jumped up to see what was the matter. On reaching the front door we found a number of unrecognizable snow-covered figures descending from a large sleigh, bearing cakes and other provisions in their hands, and headed by Hurlbut with the musical box, who explained to us that it was a surprise party. A second sleigh load brought in the rest of Glenbrook, and the whole house was full of confusion. Mollie made one bolt for her room to change her dress, Charlie was roused out of bed, snow-covered garments were deposited wherever room could be found for them, tables were taken out of the way, and chairs were brought in. Our double parlour just managed to hold them all, seventeen adults and seven children, and I think they enjoyed their evening. Besides the dancing, Mollie and Hunkin as her lieutenant, introduced some games which she had discovered in a leaflet of Hood's Sarsaparilla. The secret had been well kept, and no people could have been taken more thoroughly by surprise than we were at this sudden invasion in the deep snow, and with fresh snow still falling heavily. A surprise party is certainly a great invention, but it could only succeed in a country like America, where everyone is genial and good-natured, and willing to enjoy themselves, taking things just as they find them. Our experiences of Glenbrook have quite converted Mollie, who now says she likes real Americans. For myself, I have always maintained that the real inhabitants of the West are delightful.

The weather at the end of March and during most of the winter was simply perfect. Day after day we sat out in the sun, either round the house or more often at Mollie's wigwam on the shores of the placid blue lake, and many an afternoon it was too hot to sit in the sun, and we were compelled to protect ourselves from its rays. No one who had not experienced it would credit the possibility of such weather in a mountain range 6,000 ft. above sea level in the depth of winter.

Spring was coming. The lake was waking to life again, and the new railway to Truckee opened, but our pleasant stay at Glenbrook was coming to a close. I had resided the six months necessary to

R

acquire a domicile in the State, and under the advice of Mr. Vanderlieth of Carson City, our faithful lawyer, my petition had been filed, and the necessary steps taken to secure a divorce from Mabel Edith on the grounds of desertion. We closed the establishment, dismissed our two faithful Chinamen with infinite regret, and sold off our furniture by auction to our friends without any reserve. After the necessary interval the case came on before Judge Mack of Ormsby County in a Court House which looked like a small village schoolroom with a casual audience of about half a dozen. It only occupied a few minutes, and at the end of that time according to American law I was free. About three days later we were married on a Sunday by Judge Curler in the Riverside Hotel at Reno, and duly received our marriage certificate. I cabled the information to England for insertion in The Times, and we left for Chicago. Here we stayed a day or two while I went to Kokomo to buy a Haynes-Apperson motor-car. Our arrival created a sensation, and we were besieged with reporters. On the night I was away Mollie fell over one on the doormat outside her bedroom, and when he asked after me she merely said that I had left her, and she didn't know where I was. A most sensational story with scare-heads appeared in the local paper next day :

EARL

DESERTS HIS THREE DAYS BRIDE

DOES NOT KNOW WHERE HE IS

We went on to New York and returned to England in the Ivernia without further adventure.

CHAPTER XXVIII

TELEGRAPH HOUSE

'N May, 1900, we returned to England as man and wife according

I

to American law, but in the eye of the English law still living in sin. We set up a home in London in rooms on the fourth floor of 8 Raymond Buildings, Gray's Inn, where the accommodation was restricted, but we somehow managed. I still had my house at Maidenhead, Amberley Cottage, but I had got rather tired of the river. I had gone up and down it until I knew every lock, every shoal and every backwater, and it was beginning to be crowded. Moreover, I always let my house furnished, and so missed most of the summer on the water, and only enjoyed the biting fogs of the winter. There were, however, other reasons besides this. I had grown accustomed to the freedom, the solitude, and the magnificent openness of the South Downs, and I found Maidenhead stuffy and stifling, and my exceedingly comfortable and well-built house rather villa-like and suburban. I forgot to mention that I had immediately rebuilt my house after the fire and re-furnished it. The fact was I could no longer breathe at Maidenhead, and felt oppressed in its atmosphere. Moreover, I had lost my seat on the various local bodies through my prolonged absence, and was not sufficiently interested to wish to regain it at the next election.

Some years before quite by accident in answer to an advertisement, I had taken a train to Rogate, a little station on the Midhurst branch of the South Western, on that very worst of all its services, the Portsmouth line. I had hired a little trap from someone called Lintott at the Railway Inn, and I had been driven to the foot of Beacon Hill. From here I climbed on foot 450 feet to the Downs searching for the little cottage advertised for sale at £600. It was a blustering November day with fine intervals between the showers, and I walked on over the crest of the hill and suddenly came on the house a little way down the further slope hidden in trees. The views on every side were magnificent; before me was spread nearly the whole of Spithead, and half of the Isle of Wight, and behind

me on the other side of the South Downs were Blackdown, Hindhead, and the hills encircling Petersfield. Instantly I fell in love with the place and determined that I must have it. The house was only a four-roomed cottage, with a kitchen annexe, and it had been used by the wife of Sir Rennell Rodd, one of our Ambassadors, as a summer home for London children; but, however lacking the house, the site made up for everything, and I felt that at some future time I might be able to afford to build a decent house there. So after very brief negotiations, I purchased the freehold for £450. The matron who had been running it told me what I could quite believe, that the London children wailed with misery at its isolation, and would never come back a second time; all the beauty of the country, all the heather, the fern, and the wildness was just so much added unhappiness to these exiles who longed for pavements and shops. I installed a nominee in possession for some years as I was anxious to acquire more land than the one acre that I had at present, and did not want the price put up against me.

The house had been one of the Admiralty semaphore stations in the days when this was the method of rapid communication between Portsmouth Dockyard and the Admiralty in London, and was therefore called Telegraph House. In full view from the front door was a clump of trees on the top of the hill overlooking Compton, which concealed the next Telegraph House, under three miles as the crow flies. Behind the house at about the same distance not very far from Fernhurst there was a place called Telegraph Hill, but the house had ceased to exist. That was how this isolated house came to be carved out of the Downs and to stand by itself with only two houses in a radius of one mile. I have the old deeds going back to the first creation of the place. They start with a lease and re-lease from Lord Robert Spencer in 1808, and in March, 1821, the property is conveyed to the Admiralty by the old-fashioned conveyancing device of a Bargain and Sale for one year followed by a Conveyance on the following day by force of the Statute made for transferring uses into possession. It is interesting to note that the consideration was only £20 of lawful British money. By 1849 the electric telegraph had come in and the Admiralty sold it back to private persons describing it as a square containing One Acre which was selected and marked out on the part of the Government as and for a Signal Station together with the house, edifices, erections and buildings and of machinery, furniture, fixtures, articles and things." After that it continued to change hands frequently from

66

people who died or went bankrupt until it came into the possession of Miss Guthrie.

From this moment Telegraph House became my passion, and I set myself to beautify it, to embellish it, and to aggrandize it. My first act was to acquire from Willie James the adjoining acre, which I only found after completing the purchase I had not bought. The whole two acres were surrounded by the most wonderful beech hedge and the second acre was divided into three plots by beech hedge. My first improvement was to make a Tennis Court in one of these enclosures, and I left an old labourer to work the whole winter at levelling the ground, which had a total difference of level of 9 feet. My country consists of solid chalk rock with a thin covering of 2 to 4 inches of soil. Embedded in the chalk are numerous large flints, and one day when I asked my old Sussex man how he was getting on with his digging, he said: "They flints do tarrify my pick." This labourer was an engaging old ruffian named Newall, of great age, who always declared himself to be a Crimean Veteran, but I am credibly informed by more accurate reporters that the nearest he got to the Crimea was seeing the troops embark at Portsmouth. He told me that he did not care to work for the District Council any longer, as they only offered him 2s. a day on account of his age, and he regarded 2s. 6d. a day as the minimum wage. The standard agricultural wage was 15s., and I gave my people 16s.; think of it as compared with the wages of the present day. After about three years I pensioned the old man off with 10s. a week, but after a year of this he preferred the comfort of the workhouse where he died. This was almost the usual thing for agricultural labourers in those days, and our wages were high compared to some parts of England.

The next thing I did was to acquire an additional seven acres from Willie James, and to plant a laurel hedge separating me from the so-called public highway, which ran just in front of the house. This was a mere grass track and a high road only in name. The house could only be approached with difficulty by a two wheel trap. My next work which was a great one, was to build on an extension containing two good bedrooms, a bath-room, and a library, and to put a servants' hall at the back of the kitchen.

In 1901, Mollie and I decided that the time had come for us to live at Telegraph House, and I sold Amberley Cottage at a considerable loss to the beautiful and unfortunate Mrs. Atherton. I also sold my launch and my steam engine, but I removed with me