Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/195

Rh such men at such times it must have seemed as if their world was going to pieces around them. But after all,” he said, “the sun rose next day, the river flowed between its banks, and the world went on very much the same despite it all. And, thinking of this, I used to go to bed and sleep like a child.”

A still more remarkable instance of the deliberate way in which he practised the maxim was also told me. When Mr. Rhodes came home after the Raid he fully expected to be sent to prison, and amused himself during the voyage by drawing up a scheme of reading which he hoped to carry out during the seclusion of the gaol; but it was not until after his death that I heard from Lord Grey how he proposed to nerve himself for the ordeal of imprisonment.

“Do the comparative!” Mr. Rhodes said to Lord Grey one day when they were together in Rhodesia. “Always do the comparative! You will find it a great comfort. For instance, if I had been sent to gaol after the Raid, I had fully made up my mind what I would do. I should have gone down to the Tower before I was locked up; I should have gone to the cell in which poor old Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned before he was led out to be beheaded; I should have gone to the cell and thought of all that Raleigh suffered in the long years in which he lay there. And then, afterwards, when I was in my comfortable cell in Holloway Gaol, I should have consoled myself every day by thinking, ‘After all, you are not so badly off as poor Sir Walter Raleigh in that cell of his in the Tower.’”

On another occasion, when he had been made wretched by the attacks made upon him in the Cape Parliament for his share in the Raid, when