Then in February he went down with a slight fever. “I have gastric influenza and fever,” he wrote on the 5th, followed on the 17th by “I’m up and better, only rather groggy (or, to be strictly correct, shaky) on my pins.” Once again Oxford took him off the last chapter. But in mid-March he shut the doors once more, “My term has taken long in dying, but now at last I think it is dead, and my mind (a rag-bag stuffed with its debris) is free for other uses (as soon as I can empty it).” He got to work again and tackled some of the notes which the office had prepared for him to use in the revision of the early chapters. “Your[1] method of preparing things for revision,” he wrote, “is excellent and will make revision easier.... I have gloomy forebodings about ----. Will he be another of those whose criticisms amount, in effect, to a single complaint that they are wallflowers at the aerial dance?... My troubles are of a different kind. You remember I treated naval co-operation in Chapter VII slightly. Now I have to treat it all over again. I wonder (though with pain) if the passages in Chapter VII ought not to be taken out and the whole thing put into Chapter VIII. Tell me your opinion. As it stands the only excuse is that Chapter VII is things done, and Chapter VIII is organization, constitution, etc. But the doubt paralyses me, for am I writing (or about to write) what must all be recast again?” Through March he was deep in the last chapter. On the 22nd he wrote: “I am always unhappy if I find myself using an unexplained term. I fear I have sometimes mentioned types of machine with no explanatory comment. You might keep an eye open for this. It is a large comfort to me to have you goal-keeping.” And on the 27th: “You will think me hopeless, but I am really stuck in the naval part of Chapter VIII. You see _I don’t know_. If none of the questions that interest me are answered in the summaries I have, are not my readers likely to be in the same position?” In the middle of April he came up to town and had dinner with General Brancker. The following day he wrote: “Brancker depresses me, because, whatever I mention he says something true and important that has not reached us. He knows all the people and is a shrewd and cheerful judge of them. I must tell you when we meet.... The latter[2] is wonderful on any period or any incident, shake the tree and a plum falls off.... Brancker is as gay as a lark.” Chapter VIII was finished at last and Sir Walter’s life-work was nearing completion. The next effort was revision. This effort was almost as worrying as the original writing. The records are often contradictory and sometimes a whole day was spent trying to check some small fact which eventually was cut out of the book.