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subjects extremely well. Really you might have secured the highest honours—the very highest honours—but you see you haven’t done anything at all about your mediaeval history, or your constitutional documents.’ And Monty, who could get on with all the world, even examiners, just smiled and said ‘Well, Sir, you really mustn’t
mind
having to give me a third.’ I thought for a minute he was going to pat the old gentleman on the back.” He read widely too in modern literature, but then I could never tell what he would like, and what not, for his taste was capricious. I remember asking him once whom he really enjoyed to read, who were his literary idols among the moderns.
    â€œWell,” he said, “Max Beerbohm of course, he has the greatest descriptive power of them all, and then, but
longo intervallo
, P. G. Wodehouse, and Dickens when I have time, and William Watson and Stevenson and Rupert Brooke and Flecker, and George Moore and Hemingway, oh, and hosts of others. Not a very highbrow list, but you didn’t give me notice of the question.”
    Looking back on it all—and, believe me, two years in the Antarctic gives a man time to rearrange his views and his impressions—I feel sure that it wasn’t Monty’s skill or talents that made him what he was. No, it was his immense zest for life, his enjoyment of every hour, his power of making others feel always the better for his company. Every party went well if he was there; no show, somehow, was ever a failure if he was in the audience.
    In London it was the same. He knew everyone, and had a charitable explanation of the doings of them all.His work was journalism—about that he had never had a doubt—and there were not many aspects of the precarious existence of the journalist that he did not sample. His writing was good, for he could bring life into common things, and sometimes, when he touched on historical or literary subjects, it was distinguished. No doubt he was helped by being spared the harder trials of his profession, for he had a little money of his own, though not much, and, so I understood, considerable expectations from some aged relatives. He could, therefore, afford—and he made free use of the opportunity—to enjoy himself, and to be a little fastidious in his choice of topics. But though he was, in a sense, fairly well off, he was a generous and sometimes a reckless spender, and therefore not infrequently in a state of financial embarrassment. It was from one of his crises that I had been able to rescue him by the loan of a couple of hundred pounds. I remember well the difficulty I had in inducing him to take a sum which meant nothing to me; I remember still more vividly my pleasure when he repaid me precisely on the date which he had himself chosen—for I had been oppressed by a nervous dread that a sense of obligation on his side would mar our friendship.
    How pitifully feeble is any description of a friend! I can describe his career, I can estimate his intellectual talents, I can criticize his acts or his writings. But the thousand bonds that unite us, the chance remarks, the jokes that we have shared, the common sympathies—and the common antipathies still more—the games and the laughter, the days in the sun and the evenings before the fire—how can they be analysed or described? Something of that kind I had once said, haltingly enough, to Monty himself.
    He had smiled as he replied. “You mustn’t try to describe that sort of pleasure. Don’t you remember Johnson’s letter to Boswell when Boswell had been a bit too enthusiastic? It’s a good passage; how doesit go? To disappoint a friend is unpleasing: and he that forms expectations like yours must be disappointed. Think only when you see me, that you see a man who loves you, and is proud and glad that you love him.’ You can’t beat the eighteenth century for saying that kind of thing