Lord Granville proposed the toast of the evening, describing 'himself
as selected for that duty in consequence of the leisure -secured to him by "something like a general lock-out." He told the engineers a story of a distinguished foreigner who had 'been studying the English with profound admiration of their achievements, and trying to find out the secret of those achieve- ments, till, at last, he thought he had hit it when he had heard a certain ecclesiastic preach, and a certain Member of the House of Commons speak :—" It was patience that did it all." Another distinguished foreigner had told him that the great English quality was the happy art of proportioning the means to the object in view. Both qualities were great • qualities with engineers. But there was another quality, of the practice of which they were not only the examples at that moment, but also in still greater degree the causes,—hospitality, —for by almost annihilating distance, they had done more to make men each other's guests than any moral cause could have effected. Lord Granville always does this kind of thing well. He has almost a patent for it. But he forgot that engineers have done as much to shorten visits as they have to multiply them, and that perhaps the visits in snippets of which we have so many now-a-days, do not greatly test hospitality in the old sense of the -word.
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