Like his friend Sir James Barrie, Sir Walter believed courage to be the lovely virtue. He was fond of dissecting the British character. His book on the air is full of delightful passages on this subject. Courage, he says in his book, is found everywhere amongst English-speaking peoples. Originally he wrote that courage was an epidemic virtue among English-speaking peoples. Some people who were privileged to read his original manuscript, were a bit doubtful about this use of the word ‘epidemic.’ One distinguished air officer spoke rather roughly about “outbreaks of pimples.” Sir Walter altered the phrase and in a characteristic note, which shows the trouble he took to find a single correct word, he wrote to me on a postcard, “I find _epidemic_ is used by Milton and Swift as I use it. Later the word was restricted to medical uses (and metaphors drawn therefrom). I suppose my writing is too much under old and classic influences, for I did not at first understand the objection. I don’t know what to do. Where modern semi-educated usage impoverishes a word, I hate to give way. But I want to be understood.” Official documents do not always show such nice choice of words. Sir Walter accordingly sometimes got high fun out of the records. A pamphlet (a very able one) was sent to him mostly dealing with the supply of munitions. “I wonder,” he wrote, “in what language does the Munitions Man write to his wife? I shall set him to my classes to translate, e.g., ‘The output of light bombs was greatly in excess of that of the heavier natures’ = ‘The bombs made were mostly light bombs.” “When he says ‘in the case of bombs,’ he doesn’t mean the case. When he says evolve, factors, evaluate, and the like, he doesn’t mean anything much. Public office English is ‘a bloody jargon.’” And again, “Lord Haldane, in a letter to me, says the Wrights were ‘empirics.’ I suppose he means they merely did it.” But Sir Walter could never be anything but good-natured in his fun-making. He enjoyed life to the full and sought fun wherever he could find it. And perhaps he found it most in the dignity of outlook of what he sometimes called the big-bugs. On seeing the photograph of one distinguished public man who takes himself very seriously, he commented, “It was of a face like ----’s that Charles Whibley once said, ‘God has put that mark upon them so that we may know them.’”