high and flourishing his whip
was a conqueror carrying off his helpless victims.

Like the "buffers" at the Veneering election, he spent much of his
time "taking cabs and getting about"--or not even getting about in
them, but leaving them standing at the door for hours on end. Calling
on one publisher he placed in his hands a letter that gave excellent
reasons why he could not keep the engagement! The memory so admirable
in literary quotations was not merely unreliable for engagements but
even for such matters as street numbers and addresses. Edward
Macdonald, who worked with him later, on _G.K.'s Weekly_, relates how
some months after the paper had changed its address he failed one day
to turn up at a board meeting.

Finally he appeared with an explanation. On calling a taxi at
Marylebone he realized that he could not give the address, so he told
the driver to take him to Fleet Street. There as his memory still
refused to help, he stopped the taxi outside a tea-shop, left it
there while he was inside, and ordering a cup of tea began to turn
out all his pockets in the hope of finding a letter or a proof
bearing the address. Then as no clue could be found, he told the
driver to take him to a bookstall that stocked the paper. At the
first and second he drew blanks but at the third bought a copy of his
own paper and thus discovered the address.

I am not sure at what date he began to hate writing anything by hand.
My mother treasured two handwritten letters. I have none after a
friendship of close on thirty years. But I remember on his first
visit to my parents' home in Surrey his calling Frances that he might
dictate an article to her. His writing was pictorial and rather
elaborate. "He drew his signature rather than writing it," says
Edward Macdonald, who remembers him saying as he signed a cheque:
"'With many a curve my banks I fret.' I wonder if Tennyson fretted
his." At one of our earliest meetings I asked him to write in my
Autograph Book. It was at least five years before the _Ballad of the
White Horse_ appeared, but the lines may be found almost unchanged in
the ballad:

VERSES MADE UP IN A DREAM
(which you won't believe)

People, if you have any prayers
Say prayers for me.
And bury me underneath a stone
In the stones of Battersea.
Bury me underneath a stone,
With the sword that was my own;
To wait till the holy horn is blown
And all poor men are free.

The dream went on,