“Well,” said Lord Grey, “I am sorry to tell you that Groote Schuur was burnt down last night.”
The tense look of anguish disappeared from Rhodes’s face. He heaved a great sigh, and exclaimed with inexpressible relief—
“Oh, thank God, thank God! I thought you were going to tell me that Dr. Jim was dead. The house is burnt down—well, what does that matter? We can always rebuild the house, but if Dr. Jim had died I should never have got over it.”
Only those who knew what Groote Schuur was to Mr. Rhodes can understand the depth and fervour of a human attachment which enabled him to bear the loss of his house not merely with equanimity but absolute gratitude.
It is a very striking illustration of the practical value of one of Mr. Rhodes’s favourite sayings:—
“Do the comparative. Always do the comparative.”
By this he meant, whenever you are overtaken by a misfortune or plunged into dire tribulation, you can find consolation by reflecting how much worse things might have been, or how much greater had been the misery suffered by others. I well remember Mr. Rhodes telling me how he had frequently supported himself in the midst of the most trying crisis of his career, when everything seemed to be lost. He used to say—
“When I was inclined to take too tragic a view of the consequences of apparently imminent disaster, I used to reflect what the old Roman Emperors must have felt when (as often happened) their legions were scattered, and they fled from a stricken field, knowing that they had lost the empire of the world. To
