A leisurely volume this twelfth, now lying on the table behind Mr. Amber's chair. Written up during its subject's short life--dear and most well-beloved to Mr. Amber every moment of it--the volume is as naturally detailed as some of the earlier volumes are naturally scrappy. Pettily detailed, perhaps. Mr. Amber starts with the precise hour and moment--6:15-½ A.M.--of the birth of the Hon. Rollo Percival Redpath Letham; notes his colouring--fair; his weight at successive infantile months--lusty beyond the average, it would appear; date of his first articulate speech; date of first stumbling run across the nursery floor--and suchlike small beer. His father's death is chronicled ("cf. vol. XI, pp. 196 _et seq._") and he is shown to be yet in his third year when he becomes twelfth Baron Burdon.... Date of measles.... Date of whooping cough.... First riding lesson.... Preparatory school.... First holidays.... First shooting lesson.... Puts a charge of shot into a keeper. It is all very closely detailed. It is detailed so closely that a gap towards the end is made conspicuous: and this is precisely that gap occupied by the "disappearance" of which Mr. Pemberton had spoken in the drawing-room at Hillside. The chronicle, that is to say, is brought very fully up to the May in which, as it shows, my lord suddenly went down to Burdon Old Manor from London, his grandmother being at Mount Street, and thence for a long holiday. It jumps to October and at once begins again to be remarkably detailed, "Our Own Correspondent's" account of the frontier engagement waiting on the table there to conclude it. But of this May to October period, covering the June to August of which Mr. Pemberton had spoken, Mr. Amber, like Mr. Pemberton, for the good reason that he knew nothing of how my lord occupied it, has nothing to say. Let it be said. My lord was in that June secretly married in London: a matter closely germane to this history, and now to be examined.
A BOOK OF THE SAME SIZE, ILLUSTRATING THE ELEMENT OF FOLLY
On a May morning, then, love in his heart, purpose in his eye, gathering in his careless hand the meshes that he is going to tug, shaking the unconsidered lives they bind--Rollo Percival Redpath Letham, twelfth Baron Burdon, "Roly" to his gay young comrades of the clubs and messes, was set down at Great Letham by the express from London.