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was a flavour of truth in it. It is difficult to avoid the thought that some of the extraordinary rapture with which he looked on the world was due in part to a premonition that he was not long to inhabit it, that his time for enjoyment was too short to allow him a moment to waste. Traces of this under-note are to be found perhaps in the poem called No Coward's Song: and again in the lines called Prayer which were written, I think, in 1907.

Flecker and I met very frequently, after the evening in Torrington Square, in the flat of a friend in South London. On these occasions he was nearly always surrounded by people who knew him better than I did, and my impressions are now a little blurred. But I retain a glimpse of him sitting at the piano dressed up in a Japanese kimono, smiling his pleasant rather sardonic smile and thumping out the tune of La Branche de Lilas or Navaho, while the rest of us shouted the choruses. And I remember many amusing contests of wit, in almost all of which Flecker came off best. Not quite in all, however, for I was present at his Waterloo. The cult of the Suburban Music-Hall was just beginning in those days, in "interior" circles, and it was a little Cockney dancer called Gertie who, on an historic evening—our hostess shamelessly abetting her—succeeded in worsting him. Gertie had learnt her back-chat in the New Cut, or else had taken lessons from a bus-conductor. Never before have I listened to such a torrent of droll invective as she poured out on the poet's (for once) defenceless head! Flecker's wit on that occasion was certainly no match for Gertie’s humour; though I think this was the only time I ever knew him to be verbally at a disadvantage.

The incident which really formed the beginning of my more intimate acquaintance with Flecker is one which reveals him so clearly that I ynust relate it, though it be at my own expense. When his