What happened was that, having left the letter in the post for some years while I formed fours and saluted, I picked up a magazine in the Mess one day and began to read a detective story. It was a very baffling one, and I really didn't see how the murderer could possibly have committed his foul deed. But the detective was on to it at once. He searched the wastepaper basket, and, picking an envelope therefrom, said "Ha!" It was just about then that I said "Ha!" too, and also other things, for my half-finished story was now useless. Somebody else had thought of the same idea. But though I was very sorry for this, I could not help feeling proud that my idea made such a good story. Indeed, since then I have fancied myself rather as a detective-story-writer, and if only I could think of something which nobody else would think of while I was thinking of it, I would try again. Some Old Companions In the days of the last-war-but-thirty-seven, when (as you will remember) the Peers were fighting the People, Lord Curzon defended the hereditary system by telling us that it worked very well in India, where a tailor's son invariably became a tailor. The obvious answer, if anyone bothered to give it, was that the tailor's son, having had his career mapped out for him at birth, presumably prepared to be a tailor, whereas a peer's eldest son, as far as one observed, did not prepare to be a statesman. Indeed, the only profession in this country to which one is apprenticed in one's childhood is that of royalty. The future King can begin to learn the "tactful smile," the "memory for faces," the knowledge of foreign languages and orders, almost as soon as he begins to learn anything. He alone need not regret his youth and say, "If only I had been taught this, that, and the other instead!" These gloomy reflections have been forced on me by the re-discovery of all those educational books which I absorbed, or was supposed to have absorbed, at school and college. They made an imposing collection when I had got them all together; fifty mathematical works by eminent Den, from a well-thumbed, dog's-eared _Euclid_ to a clean uncut copy of _Functions of a Quaternion_. It is doubtful if you even know what a quaternion is, still less how it functions; probably you think of it as a small four-legged animal with a hard shell. You may be right--it is so long since I bought the book. But once I knew all about quaternions; kept them, possibly, at the bottom of the garden; and now I ask myself in Latin (for I learnt Latin too), _"Cui bono?"_ How much better if I had learnt this, that, and the other instead!