site, where it may be seen in the accompanying photograph. In the following year came out Sir Joseph Fayrer's book:1 and in it were printed, not merely the details of Lawrence's last hours, but a copy of Lieut. Moorsom's plan of the Residency buildings, made in 1857 (p. 180), and a plan (whether stimulated by my inquiry or not I do not know) of Dr. Fayrer's own house (p. 132). From these it will be seen that the injured man, mortally wounded by a shell on July 2, 1857, while lying on a couch in an upper room in the Residency, had been carried over and laid down on a bed in the open verandah of Dr. Fayrer's house, whence after a time, owing to the severity of the fire, he was moved into the inner room or drawing-room where at 8 A.M. on the morning of July 4 he expired. Apart from the interest of historical accuracy, I do not know that any vital importance attaches to the question whether even a great man and a hero breathed his last in this or that exact spot. But I have never ceased to be amazed at the heedlessness which for fifty years had permitted a stream of visitors, some of them eyewitnesses of the tragedy, and many of them intimately acquainted with every detail and incident of the siege, to pass by, without detecting or correcting the error. 1 Recollections of my Life, London, 1900. An earlier letter from Dr. Fayrer to Colonel Wilson, dated December 23, 1864, giving the particulars of Sir H. Lawrence's last hours when they were still fresh in the Doctor's memory, is printed in the Life of Sir H. Lawrence, by Sir H. Edwardes and H. Merivale, vol. ii. 373-7, London, 1872. II THE BILLIARD TABLE OF NAPOLEON Y second experience was at St. Helena in MY 1908. During a compulsory stay of a fortnight at Grand Canary and the subsequent long sea voyage to St. Helena, I had made a careful study of every available work about the Emperor's residence in that island (having indeed provided myself with a miniature library for the purpose), and when I arrived at Longwood, the scene of his five years' exile and ultimate death, I was as familiar with the identity and history of every room in the building, as though I had lived in it myself. My knowledge was soon put to an unexpected test. As I entered the house I found the French Consul, who, as representative of the French Government, was living at New Longwood (the property having been handed over by the British Government to Napoleon III. in 1858), about to conduct a party of French visitors round the building. In the entrance room, upon the walls of which hung a board inscribed "Salle d'Attente," he was expatiating upon the uses to which this apartment had been put in the time of the Emperor. "This," he said, was the reception room where His Majesty received his guests." "Excuse me," said I, "this was, at any rate in the first few years |