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UNION SOCIETY, OXFORD
June: 2: 96
My dear Anna
Thanks very much for the candy and your letter. I shall send you the Yellow Book when I acquire enough brown paper to wrap it up in. By the by it is too bad to jeer at me for the aspersions of my enemies. I am glad Father & Mother enjoyed their trip to Edinburgh, and that the Golden Age has come back. John Edgar has promised to send me a photograph of himself.
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I have had curious MSS. to read this week, one a most fascinating book of Fairy Tales, by a Scotch Episcopalian clergyman, who hails from a place called Drumtochty, near Fordoun. Then I had one of Carmen Sylva, the Queen of Roumania, sent by her private secretary. I got a curious note on Saturday from a lady, (L. Dougall, the authoress of The Zeit-Geist), asking me to sign my name in a copy of Sir Quixote for the Blenheim bazaar, as there was to be a collection of autographed books by
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Oxford writers. She asked me to tea yesterday. I went and found that she lived in a very pretty house in the Parks. It was a perfectly tragic affair. I was ushered into a drawing-room full of ladies – and I was in flannels, just come from the river –, simply full of ladies. There was Mrs Sidgwick, the Women's Rights person, Lady May's friend, & the wife of the President of Corpus, & a lot of others. I had to talk for an hour & a half and pretend to be amused by a tame snake, which wanted to crawl up my sleeves, and for which I was horribly frightened.
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I had a very nice letter from Cameron yesterday. Lane wants me to stay with him at the Albany when I go up to London, but I am going to Uncle John's.
The heat here is awful. I haven't been very well again lately, troubled with asthma you know. I am so frightfully busy, that it is a great nuisance. I went to the Vice-Principal, and he allowed me to put off my Divinity Exam. till next year, wh. was very good of him.
I hope you are all well & cheerful, & that the Church is keeping up. Love to Father, Mother, Peter, Willie, Ervie & yourself.
Your affectionate brother John Buchan
