There was a Judge of whom I should have said with confidence that I had never seen him except upon the Bench. But in looking through a diary I found that 9 July 1865 ended with a note that he called in the evening; and then I saw it all. It was in London, in our drawing-room, and cups of tea were being handed round at 9.0, as was the custom then; and he came in, took hock-and-seltzer in preference to tea, and then talked away. I cannot remember what he talked about, but I can see him and the room and all its furniture and the other people on the chairs on which they sat, just as I saw it from the chair where I was sitting. That picture had been dormant in my mind for more than fifty years, and then came out quite bright and clear; and I do not know how many thousands of these pictures are lying dormant there.
Though such a picture may be bright and clear, it only shows things from the point of view from which I happened to see them, and at the moment when I happened to be there. I am not like the Reluctant Dragon: he could manage to “think of things going on, and how they kept going on just the same, you know”; and I cannot manage that. I went to Constantinople in 1880--I had not seen an Oriental town before--and I was very much impressed by the great streams of people going along the bridge of boats across the Golden Horn; perhaps, in my small way, as much impressed as Dante was in 1300, when he saw the people streaming across the bridge at Rome, _Inferno_, XVIII. 28-33. But the crowds he saw were only for the Jubilee, whereas the crowds I saw went streaming on year after year; and I can never realize that what I saw was always to be seen there, or that other sights “keep going on just the same” as at the time I saw them.
Before the War I had a notion of repeating all my early travels year by year, beginning in 1917, as that would be the jubilee of my first going abroad. I wanted to go over the same ground again and see what changes fifty years had made; but my last journey was in 1913, and I came home through Châlons, Reims, Laon, Amiens, and other places too well known next year.
I went up to Haytor rocks on 25 April 1922, having noticed in my father’s diary that we were there on 25 April 1862, and that I “climbed up both the rocks with great agility.” I climbed up both the rocks again, but cannot say I did it with agility--the sixty years had told. A fortnight later I was out near there again, beating the parish bounds: a solemnity performed each year on the Monday after Roodmas. It was a long procession at the start, but quite short at the finish five hours later on; and as we went along, I heard men saying things in French and others replying with a word or two of Japanese.