Going from strength to strength this apparently dreamy lad had climbed the giddy rungs of fame until, at the outbreak of war, he stood with the ball at his feet and the title of Deputy General Manager of the N.E.R. It was he who had invented the system whereby the handle of the heating apparatus in railway carriages could be turned either to OFF or ON without any consequent infiltration of steam, thereby saving passengers from the peril of death by suffocation. It was he who, thumping the table with an iron fist, had insisted vehemently that caged parrots travelling in the rack should, if capable of speech, be compelled to pay the full fare. It was he who effected one of the greatest economies that the line had ever known by using rock-cakes which had served their term of years in the refreshment-room as a substitute for the keys which hold the metals of the permanent way in their chairs. In the summer of 1914 he was about to adopt a patent device for connecting the official notices in compartments with gramophones concealed under the seats in such a way that when humourists had by dint of much labour made the customary emendations, such as "IT IS DANGEROUS TO LEAP OUT OF THE WINDOWS," "TO STOP THE RAIN PULL DOWN THE CHAIN" and "TO EAT FIVE PERSONS ONLY," a loud and merry peal of laughter should suddenly hail the completed masterpiece. Armageddon supervened, and the rest of Sir ERIC GEDDES' career is history. When a new and sure hand was needed at the Admiralty, Mr. LLOYD GEORGE was not long in making the only suitable choice. Sir ERIC GEDDES' bluff hearty manner, positively smacking, despite his inland training, of all that a viking ought to smack of, had long marked him out as the ideal ruler of the King's Navy, and his name was soon known and feared wherever the seagull dips its wing. Underneath the breezy exterior lay an iron will, like a precipitate in a tonic for neurasthenia, and scarcely had he boarded the famous building in Whitehall and mounted his quarter-deck (Naval terms are always used at the Admiralty, the windows being called "port-holes" and the staircases the "companion") than victory began to crown the arms of the Senior Service.