when she was not yet three years old,-provided her with all the advantages cosmopolitan society could offer.

I first came to know her just forty years ago when, as a girl of seventeen, she came up to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, the most brilliant creature who ever entered at that or any other of the women's colleges. She was younger than most of us, half child, half woman, rather untidy, with conspicuous auburn hair and vivid complexion, and a curiously long and pointed nose; mature in her judgments of men and affairs, childlike in her certainties, and most engaging in her entire belief in her father and her home surroundings. From the very first we took her to our hearts. She had more money than most of us, but it never occurred to her that this made any difference. Neither did it. She perhaps could spend more on adorning her college room, but the money all went in books and book-shelves. She threw herself with untiring energy into every phase of college life, she swam, she rowed, she played tennis and hockey, she acted, she danced, she spoke in debates, she kept up with modern literature and told us tales of modern authors, most of whom were her childhood's friends. Yet all the time she put in seven hours a day of solid work, and at the end of two years (most Honours students take three) she won as brilliant a First Class in the school of Modern History as has ever been won at Oxford. And in her viva voce she set one of her examiners right, in his own special subject, but with so charming a naïveté that no one could mind. Some German town, I forget which, she had placed on the right bank of the Rhine. He corrected her and said, "You mean left." "Oh," said Gertrude, “I am so sorry; but it really is on the right; I've been there!”

Very soon after those Oxford days Gertrude began to travel. Her aunt, Lady Lascelles, sister to Lady Bell, was the wife of the diplomat, Sir Frank Lascelles, British representative in succession to Roumania, Persia, Russia, Germany. To these legations or embassies Gertrude made prolonged visits, improving her natural gift for languages and, in Teheran, making her first acquaintance with the East and undertaking translations of Persian poetry, some of which she published as Translations from Hafiz (1897). Incidentally she went at any rate once round the world, I think twice, and she put in some spells of really adventurous Alpine

climbing. She was an intrepid mountaineer, and on one occasion narrowly escaped death in Switzerland, having with two guides lost herself upon the mountains. The three, roped together, spent two nights on slopes whence the least slip would have dashed them to certain death. "Were you afraid?" I asked her afterwards in London. "No," she said, "I was numb with cold; that was all!" And it was all, of that I am sure, for she knew no fear and she never said things for effect. She kept her body always in perfect training. She had an iron constitution. Until a year or two before the end, she scarcely knew what weakness meant. I remember walking with her some twenty years ago in the steep Arnecliffe woods near her home,-Arnecliffe means “the cliff of the eagle”,—and she said suddenly, "Let's join hands and go straight down;" and down we went at a pace that terrified me, through brushwood and fern and stones straight to the bottom. But to her it was nothing. In her later life, when she was in her splendid 'forties, she could outlast any man. It was she who explored mountain tops in Asia Minor and found Hittite inscriptions on stones, which more timid explorers had peered at from far below. She was traveling then in Cilicia and Lycaonia with Sir William Mitchell Ramsay, with whom in 1909 she wrote The Thousand and One Churches. But she had also gone quite alone into the country of the Druses, those wild and untameable tribesmen who made the Lebanon a terror to timid travelers. the story herself in The Desert and the Sown (1906).

She tells

With these children of the desert she had a natural affinity. To her they were as individual, as personally known, as are to most of us only our own countrymen. She made friends with them, she remembered all about them. When she went back again she could pick up all the threads, just as she could with friends at home. She had a great gift for friendship. I often did not see her for months and years together, but it made no difference. When we met again in London or in Yorkshire, for a few days, for the space perhaps only of an evening party, the threads were at once united, the line of friendship was never broken.

This real intimacy with the people, this quick establishment of relations and marvelous memory for personal details, was to

prove of the utmost value when the time came for Gertrude to do her country supreme service. For the opportunity came. Looking back it seems almost as if she had been set apart for such service. All her life had led up to it, little as she, or anyone else, could have forseen its nature. But even as a girl in her college days she had the single aim, the concentration of purpose, above all that consummate ease in accomplishment which is the touchstone of greatness. And almost imperceptibly she had been led on to devote her gifts as traveler, archæologist, historian, to acquiring the knowledge which her country needed.

She had never traveled for notoriety but always in search of knowledge. A born archæologist and historian, she was pursuing the study of early Christian and early Islamic architecture, and to that end wished in 1913 to visit Northern Arabia. The British Foreign Office was opposed to her going, and only her persistence prevailed over their reluctance. She went, and she went alone. She was not the first Englishwoman to go; Lady Anne Blunt had been before her; but accompanied. No one else, except intrepid explorers like Doughty, would have gone, as Gertrude went, taking her life in her hands. She came through unscathed, but not without daunting experiences. For a week or two she was detained as a "guest", a transparent euphemism for prisoner, in the haremlik of the Emir of Hayil, while he departed on a distant raid. She made use of her time to acquire an intimate "knowledge of the relationships, regular and irregular, and also of the domestic crimes, of the Rashid house," which, writes D. G. Hogarth, with whom and with T. E. Lawrence she was to work later in Cairo, she used with “startling" effect when compiling Arab Intelligence Manuals. She returned from this journey safe but exhausted, the first time I ever remember to have seen her bright vitality dimmed. A few months later came the War, and with the War her great opportunity.

She did not seize it at first; she did not even seem to see it. She had grievous personal losses of greatly loved friends. She threw herself with restless energy into work. At Boulogne, and then in London, she organized a special branch of the Red Cross, which by means of correspondents in hospitals, by questioning sick and wounded soldiers fresh from the battlefields, tried to get

details of men missing and, if possible, to trace their fate. I worked with her for a time on this, and I was greatly struck by her mental weariness and discouragement, little as she ever let either interfere with the work. But she would not, she said she could not, rest. The War obsessed her to the exclusion of every other consideration. At the end of 1915 came her call to special service. D. G. Hogarth had gone out to Cairo to organize a branch of the Admiralty Intelligence Service dealing with the Arab peoples. Thence he wrote to Gertrude, begging her to come. He had tried, before going, to induce her, but, absorbed in her Red Cross work, she would hardly listen. A few weeks later, when I went in as usual to work with her at Norfolk House, she came quickly across the room in her impulsive way, seized my arm and drew me aside. "I've heard from David; he says anyone can trace the missing but only I can map Northern Arabia. I'm going next week."

She went and, except for brief periods of leave, England and Europe knew her no more. From Cairo she was sent in 1916 to Basra. She moved up to Kut with the relieving force and accompanied the triumphant army to Bagdad. There she became an Assistant Political Officer and took a leading part in the administrative reconstruction of Mesopotamia and the establishment of the Kingdom of Iraq. She came home for the Paris Conference, and with Prince Feisal, Lawrence and others pleaded the cause of the Arabs she knew and loved. We saw her in London that spring for the first time in four years. She had aged a bit, her hair was white, she looked like finely tempered steel, but she was the old Gertrude in her quick sympathy, her recovered friendships, her love of her Yorkshire home.

She returned to Iraq to stand by King Feisal's side when he ascended his Mesopotamian throne, and to remain his personal friend and confidential adviser. But all on the strictest official lines. Foolish journalists might try to work up stunts about "The Uncrowned Queen of Mesopotamia". They got no countenance or help from Gertrude. As Assistant Political Officer, and later as Director of Antiquities, she knew her place and kept it. Her woman's wit, added to her masculine grasp of affairs, could not but make her an outstanding personality with an in

fluence that carried far, but she herself preserved the strictest official etiquette. In the masterly Review which she wrote of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia, published as a White Book by the India Office in 1920, her name just appears in a note on the cover as having been entrusted with its preparation by the Acting Civil Commissioner. The Review itself is as impersonal as a legal document.

I don't say that Gertrude was without ambition, but it was ambition to see work well done, not to see herself doing it, except in so far as she was conscious-that she could not fail to be of unusual power to do it. To the supremely capable there is no greater trial than to stand aside and see things bungled. Her sudden death, when she was not yet sixty, saved her at least from that. She was, I think, the greatest woman of our time, perhaps amongst the greatest of all time. To find any parallel to her, you have to go back to Florence Nightingale. There was the same clearness of vision, swift choice of means, magnificent disregard of opposition. For her, obstacles did not exist; she merely took them in her stride. And she had far greater personal magnetism, "radiant ardor" it was called by one of her friends, a woman (she had as many women friends as men friends) who had visited her this summer: "She had the gift of making everyone feel suddenly eager; of making you feel that life was full and rich and exciting.

.

I felt all my loneliness and despair lifted from me in a second. She was a wonderful hostess . . . .. her personality held together and made a centre for all those exiled Englishmen whose other common bond was their service in Iraq. . .. Whatever subject she touched, she lit up.' And that was in Bagdad, only a few weeks before she died, when she herself, though we at home did not know it, was fighting a deadly weariness and weakness which had made her doctors long to send her home, only she would not go whilst there was still work to do on her beloved Museum of Antiquities.

Strength was, I think, her most outstanding quality, though radiant sympathy went with it. She had her softer side; but she was determined to let no personal griefs lessen her capacity for doing. She faced a sorrow and put it behind her. "I will have no locked cupboards in my life," she said to me once, many years