Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 6).djvu/70

 hon. baronet in the present Parliament has), and was wont to sit down drinking in, through his ear-trumpet, words that the ordinary person would willingly have let die.

It struck me at the moment that Lord Sherbrooke might be thinking, as in truth I was myself, of the pandering with Providence displayed by a deaf man putting himself to some inconvenience in order not to lose a word of one of Peter Rylands's harangues. In a London Letter to the provinces I was then contributing, I put in Lord Sherbrooke's mouth the phrase quoted—a fashion habitually and sometimes less reasonably adopted at the present time in the writing of "Toby's Diary" in Punch. It took on immensely, largely because it was supposed to be Lord Sherbrooke's. It has since been quoted so widely and frequently that it is not impossible Lord Sherbrooke may have come to believe he had really said it, just as King George, by dint of frequent repetitions, convinced himself that he had led a regiment in the last charge at Waterloo. But his memory is really free from the reproach.

[The original drawings of the illustrations in this Magazine are always on view, and on sale, in the Art Gallery at these offices, which is open to the public without charge.]