Suppose, just to pass away the time, I, Max Urquhart, reduced to this lowest ebb of inanity by a paternal government, which has stranded my regiment here, high and dry, but as dreary as Noah on Ararat--were to enliven my solitude, drive away blue devils, by manufacturing for myself an imaginary correspondent? So be it. To begin then at once in the received epistolary form:-- "My dear--" My dear--what? "Sir?"--No--not for this once. I wanted a change. "Madam?"--that is formal. Shall I invent a name? When I think of it, how strange it would feel to me to be writing "my dear" before any Christian name. Orphaned early, my only brother long dead, drifting about from land to land till I have almost forgotten my own, which has quite forgotten me--I had not considered it before, but really I do not believe there is a human being living, whom I have a right to call by his or her Christian name, or who would ever think of calling me by mine. "Max,"--I have not heard the sound of it for years. _Dear_, a pleasant adjective--my, a pronoun of possession, implying that the being spoken of is one's very own,--one's sole, sacred, personal property, as with natural selfishness one would wish to hold the thing most precious. _My dear_;--a satisfactory total. I rather object to "dearest" as a word implying comparison, and therefore never to be used where comparison should not and could not exist. Witness, "dearest mother," or "dearest wife," as if a man had a plurality of mothers and wives, out of whom he chose the one he loved best. And, as a general rule, I dislike all ultra expressions of affection set down in ink. I once knew an honest gentleman--blessed with one of the tenderest hearts that ever man had, and which in all his life was only given to one woman; he, his wife told me, had never, even in their courtship days, written to her otherwise than as "My dear Anne,"--ending merely with "Yours faithfully," or "yours truly." Faithful--true--what could he write, or she desire more?