“Talk is not so easily dealt with. But there are some decent people on board. I have talked with two sad, efficient, disgruntled Indian Colonels, going back to earn their pension. And of course there are social ladies. When I was a lean gawky youth, they were not kind enough to me. I don’t blame them, but when they are kind now, I wish they had come earlier. “Book is all right. Small corrections occur to me. Can’t make ’em now. Doesn’t matter. God be with the office and all that therein are!” A few days later he arrived at Port Said and sent me the last letter I ever received from him. “Here I am at Port Said after a calm and easy voyage.... I am to go by train to Jerusalem to-night (it takes some seventeen or eighteen hours). There I am to meet Ellington and to be his fellow-guest at the house of the High Commissioner. He is to drive me to the Nablus road. Then to Cairo by aeroplane and from Cairo direct to Baghdad.... “It’s going to be tiresome to-night, but once I get to the R.A.F. I think things will be very easy.... “Baghdad seems to be a gay centre. I came on the boat with Major Lord Gough, a one-armed Irish officer, who has left home to escape the tax-collector, and is going to command Arab levies at Baghdad. He will do well, I am sure; he is cool, pleasant, practical, ready-witted and original. Indeed he shocked the Anglo-Indian officers on board, but the Arabs, I think, will take to him. “It has all been absurdly easy up to now, thanks to you. I will write again.” He never did. The next time I saw him was at Victoria Station on his return on April the 25th. He had been due to arrive the previous day. Lady Raleigh had spent the day meeting continental trains. She had to return to Oxford on the Tuesday afternoon, so I went down that evening to watch the trains in to see if he would arrive. The likeliest one was the train timed to arrive at 7.30. Actually it came in, in two portions, an hour later. Sir Walter was on the second train. He stepped out of the saloon loaded like a Christmas tree. He had all his own luggage packed for convenience of travelling in suit-cases. He carried a topee and wore a waterproof cap, with many flaps and folds, slightly tilted. Under one arm packed in straw and canvas was a thigh boot which some one had given to him in the desert with a request that he bring it to London and have it delivered to the address marked on it, where, presumably, it was to be half-soled and heeled or otherwise reconstructed. Under the other arm was a large round bundle, similarly addressed for delivery to a lady in London. This parcel, he supposed, contained Turkish Delight. This fugitive gift to a lady was carried a few thousand miles from the desert by Sir Walter Raleigh, already in the grip of a fatal fever. The many stories of his great forbear hardly approach this for sheer charm and gallantry!