high spirits. A friend who wrote of him while he lived, speaks of his impetuous yet delicate sympathy with all vital and beautiful things. 'Vitality runs out of him in a bubbling stream. He has more enjoyment of all things worth enjoying and he is better able to express his enjoyment than anybody I ever knew.... When he speaks of some wonderful flight through clouds and sunshine I can feel the air rushing past me and revel with him in the miracles of light and colour he has seen.' Yet he found him 'happiest when he is talking about country places and especially about his own countryside of river, fen and mere.' It was this friend who, seeing in Jeffery Day 'a nature made after the manner of Philip Sidney, poet and knight in one,' and recognising the poetic quality of his mind, more in his conversation than in the gay, spirited rhymes he began to write in those days to amuse the ward-room, urged him to put his thoughts and experiences of flying into verse. The result was his first poem, 'On the Wings of the Morning':
