will I read it? Clearly 'twas no ordinary book. Everybody was saying
so, and what Everybody is saying has considerable weight. A book not
to be trained through at express pace, so that the beauties of the
surrounding scenery would be lost, but something that when once
taken up cannot be put down again, like the brass knobs worked by an
electric-battery,--something giving you fits and starts, and shocks,
as do the electric brass-knobs aforesaid; something that, if you begin
it at 4 P.M., exhausts you by dinner-time, and after dinner, keeps you
awake till you read the last line at 2 A.M., and then tumble into bed
parched, fevered, exhausted, but in ecstasies of delight, feeling as
if you were the hero who had experienced all the dangers, and had come
out of them triumphantly.

[Illustration]

Such were the Baron's anticipations as to the joys in store for him
on reading _The Wrecker_, by Messrs. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON and LLOYD
OSBOURNE. The Baron hit on a plan, he must isolate himself as if he
were a telephone-wire. "Good," quoth he, "Isolation is the sincerest
flattery,--towards authors." The friend in need, not in the sense of
being out at elbows, appeared at the right moment, as did the Slave
of the Lamp to _Aladdin_. "Come to my house in the mountains," said
this Genius, heartily; "come to the wold where the foxes dwell, not
a hundred miles from a cab-stand, yet far far away,--amid lovely
scenery, in beautiful air, to quiet reposeful rooms, with the silence
of the cloister and the jollity of the Hall where beards wag all, in
the evening, when the daily task is done." "Friend REGINALD SYDE, I
thank thee," responded gratefully the Baron. "I am there!" And in less
time than it takes to go the whole distance in a four-horsed coach
with a horn blowing and the horses blown, the Baron, travelling by