The leaven worked, and while studying with a view to a second attempt in the next autumn, he devoted his leisure hours to the composition of _The Oxford Circus_. His incurable weakness in mathematics, however, asserted itself more and more during these months, and when the time came round he did not feel that his chances of success justified a second visit. The clerical career, then, was closed to him, and he had perforce to search for other employment. His quest was soon rewarded. An advertisement inserted in _The Times_ newspaper, under the appropriately chosen sobriquet of “Gaveston,” brought him an offer of work from a famous memory-training institute, which required the services of a representative in the Far East. Success seemed well within his grasp, and in due course he sailed from Cardiff to take up his post in Japan. The rest is soon told. To the quiet little vicarage at Widdleswick came a few short letters, bearing strange foreign stamps, and posted at Gibraltar, at Brindisi, at Port Said, and later handed over to us as his literary executors. They told, simply and modestly, of his hopes and fears, his ship mates and their ways, and in one he spoke of his plans for a sequel to _The Oxford Circus_, itself only completed a very few days before sailing. But it was not to be: dis, as he himself had said with reference to his University career, _aliter visum_.… For during the always trying passage of the Red Sea, poor Alfred disappeared. He supped, but did not take his place for breakfast. Neither his fellow-passengers nor the captain nor the crew could throw any light on his whereabouts, and it was presumed that he had fallen overboard in the darkness. They further presumed that his fall had been accidental. Alfred Budd is dead. His readers will be at one with us in regarding his loss as a grave one to English letters. He despised coteries and disliked cliques. He was an honest workman of literature, using none but sound materials, none but well-established models. For its wit, its photographic realism and its daring originality, _The Oxford Circus_ is a first novel of which any publisher might be proud. Its sparkling epigrams, and its vivid portrayal of life in many different strata of our modern society, seem almost unexpected from one who lived so quietly as Mr. Budd. Yet somehow his originality of invention leaves no room for doubt: Budd was perhaps the first novelist to introduce the London and North Western Railway station into a novel of Oxford life. Such a writer had no mean future.