“By the way, I forgot to tell you,” he said, “I had a letter from White yesterday.” The bronzed visage of the Colonel was also seamed with the external signs of a soundless chuckle. “Read it yet?” he asked. “Yes,” replied the lawyer; “the hieroglyphic was attacked with fresh vigour after breakfast this morning, and the clouds and mysteries of yesterday’s laborious hours seemed to be rolled away. Some portions of the cuneiform still await an expert translation; but the sentences themselves appear to be in the original English.” “Very original English,” snorted Colonel Crane. “Yes, our friend is an original character,” replied Hood. “Vanity tempts me to hint that he is our friend because he has an original taste in friends. That habit of his of putting the pronoun on the first page and the noun on the next has brightened many winter evenings for me. You haven’t met our friend White, have you?” he added to Pierce. “That is a shock that still threatens you.” “Why, what’s the matter with him?” inquired Pierce. “Nothing,” observed Crane in his more staccato style. “Has a taste for starting a letter with ‘Yours Truly’ and ending it with ‘Dear Sir’; that’s all.” “I should rather like to hear that letter,” observed the young man. “So you shall,” answered Hood, “there’s nothing confidential in it; and if there were, you wouldn’t find it out merely by reading it. The Rev. Wilding White, called by some of his critics ‘Wild White,’ is one of those country parsons, to be found in corners of the English countryside, of whom their old college friends usually think in order to wonder what the devil their parishoners think of them. As a matter of fact, my dear Hilary, he was rather like you when he was your age; and what in the world you would be like as a vicar in the Church of England, aged fifty, might at first stagger the imagination; but the problem might be solved by supposing you would be like him. But I only hope you will have a more lucid style in letter-writing. The old boy is always in such a state of excitement about something that it comes out anyhow.” It has been said elsewhere that these tales are, in some sense, of necessity told tail-foremost, and certainly the letter of the Rev. Wilding White was a document suited to such a scheme of narrative. It was written in what had once been a good handwriting of the bolder sort, but which had degenerated through excessive energy and haste into an illegible scrawl. It appeared to run as follows: