Mr. Amber took a seat before the fire. He was unsettled, he found, for further progress that night upon the work that had engaged him at the table. But his mind turned to it and from it to the eleven fine volumes into whose company it would go, completing the lives of the Barons Burdon that were the fruits of many years of loving labour--result of "our little hobby." In memory he trod again those happy days--saw himself installed librarian at Burdon Old Manor, a bookish youth, weak-backed, weak-eyed, son and despair of a tenant farmer; rehearsed again that youth's aimless, browsing years among the books, acquiring strange and various knowledge from the shelves, developing affections, habits, tastes that, as with tentacles, anchored him by heart and mind to the house of Burdon. Mr. Amber moved restlessly in his chair and came to the beginning of the great scheme, propounded by her gracious ladyship, that was to become "our little hobby," as immediately it became the purpose and enthusiasm of his life. Well, it was done--or almost done. The results of desperately exciting scratching about the library--among distressed old books, among family trees, among deeds, letters, parchments, rolls, records--were in eleven fine manuscript volumes--only the twelfth to finish. A leisurely volume this twelfth, now lying on the table behind Mr. Amber's chair. Written up during its subject's short life--dear and most well-beloved to Mr. Amber every moment of it--the volume is as naturally detailed as some of the earlier volumes are naturally scrappy. Pettily detailed, perhaps. Mr. Amber starts with the precise hour and moment--6:15-½ A.M.--of the birth of the Hon. Rollo Percival Redpath Letham; notes his colouring--fair; his weight at successive infantile months--lusty beyond the average, it would appear; date of his first articulate speech; date of first stumbling run across the nursery floor--and suchlike small beer. His father's death is chronicled ("cf. vol. XI, pp. 196 _et seq._") and he is shown to be yet in his third year when he becomes twelfth Baron Burdon.... Date of measles.... Date of whooping cough.... First riding lesson.... Preparatory school.... First holidays.... First shooting lesson.... Puts a charge of shot into a keeper. It is all very closely detailed. It is detailed so closely that a gap towards the end is made conspicuous: and this is precisely that gap occupied by the "disappearance" of which Mr. Pemberton had spoken in the drawing-room at Hillside. The chronicle, that is to say, is brought very fully up to the May in which, as it shows, my lord suddenly went down to Burdon Old Manor from London, his grandmother being at Mount Street, and thence for a long holiday. It jumps to October and at once begins again to be remarkably detailed, "Our Own Correspondent's" account of the frontier engagement waiting on the table there to conclude it. But of this May to October period, covering the June to August of which Mr.