. . . 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.
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