of the author of this epoch-making
statement. Joyce-Armstrong, according to the few friends who really
knew something of the man, was a poet and a dreamer, as well as a
mechanic and an inventor. He was a man of considerable wealth, much of
which he had spent in the pursuit of his aeronautical hobby. He had
four private aeroplanes in his hangars near Devizes, and is said to
have made no fewer than one hundred and seventy ascents in the course
of last year. He was a retiring man with dark moods, in which he would
avoid the society of his fellows. Captain Dangerfield, who knew him
better than anyone, says that there were times when his eccentricity
threatened to develop into something more serious. His habit of
carrying a shot-gun with him in his aeroplane was one manifestation of
it.

Another was the morbid effect which the fall of Lieutenant Myrtle had
upon his mind. Myrtle, who was attempting the height record, fell from
an altitude of something over thirty thousand feet. Horrible to
narrate, his head was entirely obliterated, though his body and limbs
preserved their configuration. At every gathering of airmen,
Joyce-Armstrong, according to Dangerfield, would ask, with an enigmatic
smile: "And where, pray, is Myrtle's head?"

On another occasion after dinner, at the mess of the Flying School on
Salisbury Plain, he started a debate as to what will be the most
permanent danger which airmen will have to encounter. Having listened
to successive opinions as to air-pockets, faulty construction, and
over-banking, he ended by shrugging his shoulders and refusing to put
forward his own views, though he gave the impression that they differed
from any advanced by his companions.

It is worth remarking that after his own complete disappearance it was
found that his private affairs were arranged with a precision which may
show that he had a strong premonition of disaster. With these
essential explanations I will now give the narrative exactly as it
stands, beginning at page three of the blood-soaked note-book:

"Nevertheless, when I dined at Rheims with Coselli and Gustav Raymond I
found that neither of them was aware of any particular danger in the
higher layers of the atmosphere. I did not actually say what was in my
thoughts, but I got so near to it that if they had any corresponding
idea they could not have failed to express it. But then they are two
empty, vainglorious fellows with no thought beyond seeing th