But here is enough to show that Buchan need not think he is demonstrating his Scottish practicality by going in for publishing. As a fact, I have always felt that publishing should be properly classed as a sport. It is more speculative than racing and I do not see how any man on the Turf can get so much excitement and uncertainty by backing a horse as he could get by backing a new book. You can form a pretty reliable idea of what a horse is capable of before you put your money on it, but for the publisher, more often than not, it is all a game of chance, since whether he wins or loses depends less on the quality of the book than on the taste of the public, which is uncalculable. So when Buchan went publishing he was merely starting to live romance as well as to write it. A son of the manse, he was born in 1875, and going from Edinburgh University to Brasenose, Oxford, he took the Newdigate Prize there, with other more scholarly distinctions, and became President of the Union. Even in those early days he developed a love of sport, and found recreation in mountaineering, deer-stalking and fishing. His enthusiasm for the latter expressed itself in the delightful verses of “Musa Piscatrix,” which appeared in 1896, while he was still at Oxford, his first novel, “Sir Quixote,” a vigorous romance somewhat in the manner of Stevenson, who was then at the height of his career, having given him prominence among new authors a year earlier. I recollect the glowing things that were said of one of his finest, most brilliantly imaginative romances, “John Burnet of Barns,” in 1898, and with the fame of that going before him he came to London. There he studied law in the Middle Temple, and was called to the Bar, but seems to have been busier with literary and journalistic than with legal affairs, for two more books, “Grey Weather” and “A Lost Lady of Old Years” came in 1889; “The Half-Hearted” in 1900, and meanwhile he was occupied with journalism and contributing stories to the magazines. Then for two years he sojourned in South Africa as private secretary to Lord Milner, the High Commissioner. Two books about the present and future of the Colony were the outcome of that excursion into diplomacy; and better still, his South African experiences prompted him a little later to write that remarkable romance of “Prester John,” the cunning, clever Zulu who, turned Christian evangelist, professes to be the old legendary Prester John reincarnate, and while he is ostensibly bent on converting the natives, is fanning a flame of patriotism in their chiefs and stirring them to rise against the English and create again a great African empire. Here, and in “John Burnet of Barns,” and in some of the short stories of “The Watcher by the Threshold” and “The Moon Endureth,” John Buchan reaches, I think, his high-water mark as a weaver of romance.