I got back in time to the [US] Embassy in time to go with your mother to the lunch given by the Duke of Connaught to us. The Duke is a nice old boy. He has had a good deal of military experience as a military officer and takes great pride in it. He married, as you know, the daughter of the Red Prince of Prussia, I think his name was Charles, and he was one of the leading figures in the Franco-Prussian war. The Duke of Connaught was Governor General of Canada while I was President. He came to New York at the instance of Whitelaw Reid, to a dinner and a reception which Whitelaw gave him while Whitelaw was Ambassador to Great Britain and was at home on a vacation. The newspapers criticised his coming into the country without calling on the President, so the old Duke most conscientiously asked the privilege of coming over to call. He came over from New York one afternoon and we gave him tea at the White House. After I left the Presidency, I went up the Canada to address a meeting of the Canadian Club at Ottowa. It was quite a brilliant function, a luncheon at which the whole of the Borden government was present, as well as the opposition. The Duke of Connaught presided. He was good enough to ask me to stay at Rideau Hall, which I did, and there he gave me a dinner. The Duchess of Connaught was then alive, and the war was on. This was in 1915 I think. I sat next to the Duchess, and she spoke in a very vigorous way of her hostility to the Germans. She was not well then and died during the war. These previous experiences made me feel I knew the Duke.  I had not seen him until the lunch though he was present at Court and we bowed to each other there. The Duke lives at Clarence House, a very pleasant home I should judge, and he had with him at the time his daughter Patricia and her husband Captain Ramsey, for she married a commoner, as well as his daughter-in-law, Princess Arthur of Connaught. Her husband, the Duke’s son, is the Governor General of South Africa, and she had just returned from there, leaving her husband on duty. Earl Balfour, Lord Desborough, the active men of the Pilgrims, Mr and Mrs Rudyard Kipling, Winston Churchill and his wife, and an aide who had accompanied Princess Arthur from South Africa were also there. The Earl of Cavan, who is now the Chief of Staff of the British Army, and possibly one or two others, whose names I have forgotten, were also members of the party. I never had met Kipling, and was very glad to see him, and I had a little talk with him and told him of the comfort he had given me in his books when I was ill in the hospital for so many weeks in Manila and had an opportunity to read them all. I called his attention especially to one verse in The Naulahka as the heading of a chapter, for which I was particularly grateful. I didn’t have to tell him because he recited it at once. It is

“Now it is not well for the Christian to hustle the Aryan Brown,

For the Christian riles and the Aryan smiles, and it weareth the Christian down;

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased,

And the epitaph drear, a fool lies here, who tried to hustle the East.”