2110-4-10-1

[unidentified]

1 Aug 1926

Pembroke Lodge. Richmond Park. Surrey.

Telephone number. Post Office, Richmond 172.

My dear John -

You are positively priceless - a national imaginative asset.

My novelists are Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Anthonly Trollope & - J.B. No other modernist for me - I have just finished dancing on your floor; & I feel as if I had bathed on a summer morning off the Fitful Head - sunshine & white horses & a strong sea breeze.

I just can't away with the present day diseased psychological analyst, the dissector of the 2nd housemaid's mind on her evening off in Battersea Park, though W.B. Maxwell, Temple Thurston & the like are old pals of mine. Let's have a jolly good rousing absolutely improbably, perfectly impossible, Treasure Island, cape & headland, heather & corrie, 10-tonner in a gale, island in the Aegean - Monte Christo, gallop with the Pytchley, Prince Charlie on Ben Alder, R.L.S. - thirty-years after Yarn. There's only one man left - since that grave is filled in Samoa - who

2

[letterhead] Pembroke Lodge. Richmond Park. Surrey.

Telephone Number. Post Office, Richmond 172.

can do it; & he will soon fill you a basket of trout of a Saturday evening in Oxfordshire with the dry-fly.

Sincerely, John; that is a d-d good story. Full of the good old "tang". I like mounting your good horse. Imaginative & being bolted with. Nothing anaemic about him. Scuttle down the ride of the covert; pound the field over the 1st fence, get well away alone with the hounds; every fence looking quite unjumpable until you just "oil" over it, & skim along on the top of the lightest grass in the shires & after the

ride of your life; & 3 fields ahead of the huntsman; roll him over just as half his body has gone to earth.

Thank you, Oh sea breeze! oh sunshine! oh John Buchan.

Yours ever, Bobbie

Don't think of answering this. Your book made me feel bright & a little mad, so I loosed off at you.

Scotland & the Blaacck Mount next month.