But let me hasten to reassure you. I am not going to invite you to follow our Case into quagmires either legal or political. I know too little about these things myself. Recent as the judgment on Appeal was, I have to stop and think for a moment before I can remember whether the Scepter people won their case or lost it, and I have only the vaguest idea what the findings of the Accidents Investigation Committees were. For most of these things I have taken Billy Mackwith's word. But he was briefed in one case, and has followed up the others with just the same pertinacity he showed when he tracked down and brought triumphantly home again those early prodigal pictures of Philip Esdaile's. And, as I had begun to see it, Charles Valentine Smith, whether on oath in the Scepter case or at the invitation of one or other of the private inquiries, was engaged on something enormously more important than the immediate results of an aeroplane crash. He was contributing his mite to something that would live when he and all else about him had been forgotten--to the labor and knowledge and unparalleled discovery of his time. II Whitaker, in its "list of London Clubs," describes my own as "Social": that is to say, that I and my fellow-members have no common bond of occupation or interest other than that of pleasant good-fellowship. We are drawn from all professions, and this gives me an opportunity I value highly, namely, that of hearing scraps of the "shop" of other men when I am bored to death with my own. Saturday nights, when there is no morrow's issue of my paper to "put to bed," usually find me in the smoking-room behind my _Pall Mall_ or _Evening Standard_, with a few other non-weekenders sitting rather widely apart also behind their papers, none of us so engrossed in the news that we are unaware of each other, but using the journals as protective cover. Occasionally we all drop them to converse; more frequently two or more will engage in conversation with the others interjecting sniping-shots across the room; and it is all rather interesting and quite unexciting and very much go-as-you-please. On a Saturday evening early in June I was sitting after this fashion, half reading, half listening to Ronald Mowbray's remarks on some boxing match or other. Mowbray's talk about boxing is sometimes rather good. He was a known man of his hands long before the sport (if you can always call it that nowadays) became quite so deadly intensive both physically and financially. Moreover, his training as a sculptor has given him a good deal of knowledge of the fundamental mechanics of the human framework, and how a slight prolongation of the heel-bone can make a Deer-foot or length of humerus a lightning hitter.