have had ten good years that they are missing . . .
Cambridge, Henley, Lord's; Ascot, and home-to-tidy, and afterwards
the little Mercedes, and you and I rolling in to Prince's and the
theatre, whilst good old Bob is for the House, to take _his_
exercises walking the lobbies; clean linen after the bath, and my own
sister beside me--she that always knew how to dress--and the summer
evening over Hyde Park Corner and the Green Park. . . . No, I mustn't
go on. It is _verboten_ even to think of a white shirt until the
Bosch hangs out the tail of _his_.

"My youngsters are missing all this, I tell myself. Yet they are a
cheerful crowd, and keep smiling on their Papa. The worst is, a kind
of paralysis seems to have smitten our home mails and general
transport for close upon a fortnight. No letters, no parcels--but
one case of wine, six weeks overdue, with half the bottles in shards:
no newspapers. This last specially afflicts young Sammy Barham, who
is a glutton for the halfpenny press: which again is odd, because his
comments on it are vitriolic.

"No books--that's the very worst. Our mess library went astray in
the last move: no great loss perhaps except for the _Irish R.M._,
which I was reading for the nth time. The only relic that survives,
and follows us everywhere like an intelligent hound, is a novel of
Scottish sentiment, entitled _But and Ben_. The heroine wears
(p. 2) a dress of 'some soft white clinging material'--which may
account for it. Young Y.-Smith, who professes to have read the work
from cover to cover, asserts that this material clings to her
throughout: but I doubt the thoroughness of his perusal since he
explained to us that 'Ben' and 'But' were the play-names of the lad
and his lassie. . . . For our personal libraries we possess:

"_R.O._--A hulking big copy of the _International Code of
Signals_: a putrid bad book, of which I am preparing, in odd
moments, a recension, to submit to the Board of Trade. Y.-Smith
borrows this off me now and then, to learn up the flags at the
beginning. He gloats on crude colours.

"_Polkinghorne_--A Bible, which I borrow, sometimes for private
study, sometimes (you understand?) for professional purposes.
It contains a Book of Common Prayer as well as the Apocrypha.
P. (a Cornishman, something of a mystic, two years my senior and
full of mining experiences in Nevada and S. America) always
finds a difficulty