MEN I HAVE PAINTED
earth seeking rest and pleasure and health in all the beauty spots where the orange blossomed, and the palm threw out its arched fronds, and the sun blazed kindly on their red bronze cheeks.
And wherever I saw them they were a race apart from all the others; almost as distinct from the Latin or the Slav or the Teuton in bearing and dress, as they were from the Oriental who knows them as the British Sahibs. On the Riviera from Hyères to Capri they have built their villas and their churches; on the Nile and in the Desert, in Ceylon, and in far-away Hong Kong, and by the shores of the Pacific, from San Diego to Vancouver, these cool-headed and warm-blooded islanders seek a climate that stirs a blood too often chilled by the fogs of their own land.
This is a race of men that stands alone among other peoples, isolated in a throng of twenty different nationalities whose chief characteristic is their resemblance one to another. What is the secret of this individuality? When was it brought about, and how?
In the enchanting garden of Costa Lupara, more beautiful, I thought, than La Mortala, Canon Armour often walked with me on the terraces, where through the gray-green olive-leaves the silver-blue sea sparkled like flashes of light from the facets of millions of gems, telling me of the glories of his own dear England, of its loyal and faithful sons and daughters. He, who had seen generation after generation of boys grow to manhood under his guidance at the Merchant Taylors' School in Liverpool, where he had been head master for forty years, could testify with pride, almost paternal, to the nobility of the youths he had had such a large part in training to be worthy of an Empire whose history was
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