I went to see the Naval Photographs to-day. They are wonderful. And all the middle of the gallery is occupied by a Naval Band which, at the first beat carries you far, far out into the open sea, my dear, so that you positively bob up and down in an open boat upon huge immense waves of sound, gasping, breathless, holding on to ropes and trying to bale out your mind with the catalogue before you are swept on again. When I reached the final room I really did give way and was floated down the stairs and into the kind air by two Waacs and a Wren who seemed to

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despise me very much (but couldn't have as much as I did myself). They asked me, when I had drunk after a glass of the most dispassionate water, whether I had lost anybody in the Navy—as though it were nothing but a kind of gigantic salt-water laundry—