It may be remembered that in one of those last two letters Oscar promised us more verses of his own. They came at length, among his other papers, in scribbled, experimental fragments which I have no[64] right to put together here, deeply moving as they are to us who can read between the sincere and simple lines. They were not directly about the war: they were about Stone House, his first school and in a sense my own, but to us both a second home. Yet they touch quite openly and naturally on Death, and on all that might come instead to hearts deepened and strengthened by the war. To Oscar it was Death that came before the lines were nearly finished; yet it is from them we know, what his happy letters never hinted, that all the time he was as ready even for that as for everything else. He thinks of old schoolfellows who have gone before him, and only asks, if die he must, to ‘die as they did, by their schoolboy honour aided.’ He pictures the Chapel at Stone House, where reproductions of the regimental colours of Old Boys killed in the Boer War hang like true knights’ banners: Once again look up above At those flags in order hung To commemorate our love.... ‘And there he stops,’ said Mr. Churchill in his beautiful sermon about our boy. ‘It may be the last words he ever wrote. Some day soon we shall have his flag to “commemorate our love.” Our love, for one of the most fearless, one of the kindest,[65] one of the simplest, one of the purest boys we ever had in this school.’ And not at Stone House only is his dear name to endure, but also at Eton, for all the hundreds she has lost. Of their own generous accord, the boys of his Eton house are placing a tablet on the wall of his old room; and for the tablet his revered ‘R. K.’ has written out one of his own stanzas, adding, ‘I like them for Oscar because of the last line’:— He scarce had need to doff his pride or slough the dross of Earth— E’en as he trod that day to God so walked he from his birth, In simpleness and gentleness and honour and clean mirth. FOOTNOTES [1] Eton College Chronicle, July 22, 1915. [2] To his godfather, Arthur Conan Doyle. [3] Lieutenant C. D. W. Rooke, 1st Cameronians, was killed in action on June 19. [4] Presently he went to see—with a result described in his letter to Mr. de Havilland, p. 46. [5] = ‘Grandmamma.’ [6] Hooge, apparently. [7] Not his last escape. A few days later: ‘A bit of a “Little Willie” came in and struck my plate while we were having lunch.’ [8] It is said that Oscar showed the way, and that the task was more ticklish than he suggests. PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO. LTD., COLCHESTER LONDON AND ETON