Skiing gloves and a wallet were easier to harness, they could be fixed on astring round his neck or could be tied to a chain, providing the chain was attached to the wallet. One day when Arnold paid me a visit in Zurich, I met hirn at the station with my car. When he was asked to produce his pass port at the hotel desk he was alarmed to discover that he had the chain only but no wallet. , he said to me. , I exclaimed, He knew exactly what he was doing, his memory and his power of concentration were enormous when it mattered to hirn. , he replied. So I drove hirn back to the station and to the place where I had parked my car. A taxi was now stationed there. , he said, I looked under the taxi, but could see nothing; it was pitch dark. I scraped around with the handle of my umbrella and suddenly fished out his wallet. , he said, Detachment is the privilege of the preoccupied- of those who hear but do not heed, to borrow Byron's words. It is by such purely personal incidents which recall Arnolds, present-mindedness that many of us like to remember hirn. One, treasured by my wife Eveline, took place years ago. It is small, a cameo, carved out of their long friendship. It was arranged that after attending a ski club meeting Arnold should collect his wife Mabel and bring her to our chalet for dinner. He arrived alone. Realizing what had happened, Eveline went to fetch her. As Mabel came into the room where Arnold was sitting, she stood behind hirn and, putting a hand on his shoulder, said: Taking that small hand in his he replied: There was laughter from other guests. They found it amusing, but what they had missed was the warmth of deep affection in his voice. Once, on a December day, our paths crossed by chance at London airport on our way to Switzerland. He obviously had had so me overweight luggage problems which he had solved by stuffing his rucksack to the brim and then slipping his heavy winter coat over body, rucksack and all. The appearance was grotesque, which he did not deny. , he greeted me, Most of his actions were based on reason. He became a Catholic by reason, as he said hirnself, and reason is a matter of faith, as Chesterton said. Reason was indeed the main pivot to which his mind was linked. An American hostess found it difficult to believe that the inventor of the slalom was the same man as had written The Flight from Reason. But then she had probably never read the chapter in his autobiography which bears the title The Return to Reason. It was also through reason that he hoped to convince our common friend, the Contessa Bonacossa, that she should believe in the RC dogma, or at least in her Creator. She argued that she had some difficulty in accepting his credo since she was deeply involved in objective reality, being much influenced by the theories of Fichte and German idealistic philosphy. Such a sweeping statement of scepticism was grist to Arnold's mill. He made a startling sally with the provocative question, intended to be his coup de grdce: , he said, ; wherupon she flashed back: Switzerland has lost in Arnold Lunn one of its sincerest friends and admirers. It was his second horne. He loved its people and lauded its mountains in his literary works. He was in accord with Ruskin, who wrote Such alandscape was indeed also Arnold's idea of Paradise on earth. He had hirnself described it at its best in his Mountains of Youth. Later, during and after the last war, I became his German publisher. His books were a discovery for the German-speaking public. One of them, the studious work and translation of Switzerland and the English, won much applause from many scholars and earned hirn, together with his other books on Switzerland, the honorary degree of Doctor of the University of Zurich. In recognition of his life-work much honour was showered upon hirn. He was a founding member 60