CHAPTER VII
AS A HOST
"If thou be made the master of a feast lift not thyself up but be among them as one of the vest—take diligent care for them and so sit down.
"And when thou hast done al thy office take thy place, that thou mayest be merry with them and receive a crown for thy well ordering of the feast."
ACCORDING to "Who's Who," "playing chess and collecting books" were H. H.'s forms of recreation; but both these were as naught compared with his love of entertaining. To see his friends and make them known to his other friends at a luncheon, dinner, or breakfast-party was a never-failing source of joy to him. His breakfast-parties after a morning swim at the Bath Club were almost an institution, and he had scant patience with lie-abeds unequal to such exertions. It was in vain a certain famous K.C. brought statistics to prove that "90 per cent. of the prisoners in our jails spring from the class that habitually rises before 8 a.m.," and that, on another occasion, Dean Wace of Canterbury, refusing a breakfast invitation, shook his head, quoting reprovingly, "Early risers are conceited in the morning and stupid in the afternoon."
At one of these breakfast-parties Mark Twain told a curious story. The talk had been of "coincidences," and Mark Twain spoke of an adventure he had experienced as a young man. He was walking in some town, when he espied what he called a "peach
