Camp at Tidworth was a splendid holiday. Of course the Plain is not so exciting as Aldershot: there are no baths and no towns to visit, but I like the bare wildness of it all, the undulating hills, the wide views on every side, the clumps of trees, the gorse and the bracken. They didn't work us very hard this year, owing to the fact that there had been some row about overdoing it at Aldershot last August. That didn't worry me. I don't come to camp to work. I come to mix with as many boys as possible, to get to know their little ways--I come to join in the "rags" at "sing-song," to see what sort of material the other schools produce, to laugh at the amazing scenes in the officers' mess, to get back some of the sleep I seem to have lost at school, to learn a little military work, to live an open-air rough-and-tumble life for a few days, and in short to enjoy myself. I had to leave early this year in order to take my M.A. It was the first time I had been back to Oxford since I came down. Of all pointless things in life the taking of an M.A. seems about the most prominent. Why should I be supposed to be a more responsible creature because I pay a few more guineas into the already overfull University chest for the privilege of exchanging my rabbit's-fur hood for a red and black silk one? Anyway I followed the convention and felt inordinately important and wise for about two hours! Oxford in the Long Vac. might please Charles Lamb but I hurried away as soon as I could. I just glanced at a few shops, reminded some long-suffering tradesmen that I was still alive and then caught a train for Minehead, where Tony met me fresh from camp. He had never been in Devon before and I had invited him down in order that he should join me in the walk which I cannot repeat too often. We went to Cloutsham Ball to see a meet of the Devon and Somerset staghounds, and had the luck to see a kill at Porlock Weir: we slept two nights at the Ship Inn and talked to Carruthers Gould and several other celebrities we met there; then we tramped over the Deer Forest to Badgeworthy Water, in which I fell and had to waste an afternoon in a croftsman's cottage while my flannels were dried.