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That was in the forgotten, by some regretted, by many derided, nineties.

The other day I was having tea with a charming friend, wise mother of many sons, when the youngest, aged two, came for the sacred hour. It was pleasant in that drawing-room and I made no haste to go. Whereupon he came to me and, with a gracious, even a gallant, gesture, held out his hand to me with the utmost friendliness, conversing the while perpetually and emphatically in a manner difficult for the uninitiated to follow. Pleased and flattered, I took the kind little hand, which pulled me to my feet. He then firmly led me to the door and out to the top of the staircase, and was preparing to escort me downstairs and to the front door, when his mother ran after us and fetched us back.

Whatever else is changing in the present; bewildering world, there is one section of the community that is essentially Conservative, not to say “Die Hard.”

Outside my window there is a long, straggling street of old cottages which have altered very little since the fourteenth century, and in those little old houses dwell many children who play in the street, games that were doubtless popular “in Thebes’s streets three thousand years ago.”