2110-5-11-15

Tanycastell Merthyr Mawr Road Bridgend, Glam.

Mar 20 '32

Colonel John Buchan

Dear Sir

Permit me to offer you my thanks for many pleasant hours spent with your great work Sir Walter Scott.

I feel constrained to write to you because I have tried my best to follow up the same furrow that you have ploughed with your novels. The conscious striving to model my books on your style has helped me more than I can say, and I believe that my latest one (The Riddle of Naps Hollow, just published by Sampson Low Marston & Co. Ltd.) is a definite step along the road.

Your latest book is in a class by itself, and it has implanted fresh hope and inspiration within me. It is not too much to say that as I read this with some volumes of Scott alongside "the scales fell from my eyes" and I can now see

my direction for the first time.

I hope you will pardon the liberty I have taken in addressing you, and not regard this as mere fulsome flattery.

I have hitched my plough to three good horses, Sir Walter Scott, Stevenson and John Buchan.

May I now presume a step further, and suggest that you write a life of Stanley Baldwin so that the common folk of England may know more of his virtues while he is still with us.

Yours sincerely

L.A. Knight.