2110-4-9-26

R.M.S. "Kildman Castle", - near Cape Town - Monday, July 26th, 1926

My dear Buchan

I want to thank you ever so much for "The Dancing Floor" : it has the same fine quality as "Midwinter" surely, - the sense of perilous lands, or of seas, and of casements opening. And then there's that that real Good Friday and easter thrill of Heroic victory : I'm indeed grateful to you for helping me to that thrill again. There is a Scots Presbyterian Minister aboard making for Kikuyu in East Africa, and I lent it to him after he took our Sunday night service last week : he seemed to really appreciate it. I think his name is Stevenson : he is from Edinburgh University, but I've not seen so very

much of him, as he is in the First. Here in the Third it has been jollily interracial at our 4-table, the two opposite me apparently Jewish, the one beside me negro - brown or coloured from America. I'm looking forward to much trekking this end of winter or beginning of spring in Mashonaland. Have you read "The Golden Stool" by a man named Edwin Smith, who was in N. Rhodesia? It seems to me on the whole very sound about the Africa of our day. I've been working at a long review of it for "The East and The West", about St. Francis and Africa, also at a Franciscan Centenary Article, and some verse, on board ship. Crashaw's "Moors and Maartydom" passage in the XVIIth Century Book you enriched me with, written about Saint Teresa, seems to make an exquisite interpretation of Saint Francis' First Missionary Journey, doesn't it? I'm hoping to be back in England by about November's end to take over my old Parish [D.V.]. The Bishop of Chelmsford seems to have secured someone for me to run it from about now till then. I'm very grateful indeed for the splendid lot of books you sent me, the Journal and "The Dancing Floor" and the Devotional Poets. I hope your Witch-Craft Romance has come out nobly. My very best

[margin] wishes for you all!! Yrs ever Arthur S. Cripps.

27th July, 1926.

c/o Bp Gaul, 29 Upper Orange St, Cape Town.

P.S.

I had the good luck to meet Gordon to-day in Cape Town. He asked affectionately enough after you. I hope to get Bp Gaul to whom I've lent it, to send on "The Dancing Floor" to him to see : he recalled yachting with you among Greek islands. I hope to be able perhaps to stay a night at Warwick Farm with him in November

A.S.C.