ed those who have endeavoured to teach me
history that my youthful brain should be so strongly grounded in
the historical tradition of over half a century ago. Yet all the
historians of modern England could not shake me in my faith. To me
QUEEN VICTORIA was no "panting little German widow," as our latest
searcher after truth has affirmed, but the august lady who listened
entranced to the beautiful poems of Lord TENNYSON and invented
electricity and the tricycle. In consequence I was considered a
counter-revolutionary, if not bourgeois. My essays were deemed
dangerously reactionary. At Oxford I once found my tutor burning one.
This shows the value the authorities attach to my work. It is too
dangerous to live; it is burnt.

I venture to think, however, that my work, based as it is on the
most respectable principles, will survive long after my tutors have
subsided into a permanent state of death in life. Like SHAKSPEARE and
the present Government I am for all time.

It is easy to see how I came to acquire this stability of thought,
owing as I do my early training to the kings and queens of England,
who are nothing if not stable. They are my acknowledged guardians and
to them I turn in all difficulties. Only a year ago they came to my
aid in a most awkward predicament. It was my lot to fill up army
forms; of what variety I cannot remember save that they were of a
jaundicy colour and connected with the men's demobilisation. On these
documents I was expected to enter, besides the usual details as to
religion and connubial felicity, the character of each man in a
single word. I at once marshalled my wooden royalties before me
in chronological order and proceeded to deal with the squadron in
rotation.

The first name on my list was that of the disciplinary sergeant-major.
It was with a glow of pride that I registered him with WILLIAM I.
as "severe." The designation of Tonks, the Mess waiter (whom we had
discovered on the night the bomb fell on the aerodrome making a home
and a house of defence in the cookhouse stove), as "heroic"
was distinctly happy. It was perhaps unfortunate that the
quartermaster-sergeant, an austere man from Renfrew, should have
found, on perusing his demobilisation card, that he was to be handed
down to posterity as "avaricious." I was also sorry to find the padre,
usually so broad-minded, in a nasty temper about the character given
to his batman, who was, he assured me, the only pious man in the
sq