Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III JOHN FITZROY SCORRIER and Dillon Patrick Mallow, both of University College, Oxford, shared a valet. That is to say that the amazing creature Len- ham belonged to Mallow, but was lent to Scorrier. Jack had no money for valets and Pat had so much that he could have kept a staff of valets if it had suited his purpose. The man Lenham, was, in a sort of way ? amazing and, at any rate, he was a source of infinite joy to his masters and all their friends. No one knew any details about his parentage. He was very tall, slight and dignified and finding that,? because the beggar was as cunning as a monkey,? a little romantic mystery about himself was an asset, he made the most of it to the last inch. He had been a private in the 2nd Battalion Bucks Volunteers Rifles. He could put six shots running through the ace of hearts with any respectable rifle. He was one of those exceptional men who could and did quote Oscar Wilde without raising unsanitary queries in the minds of his listeners. His knowledge of crops and sub-soils, cereals and forestry was very nearly that of an expert. He played the banjo, but not as a banjo. He made it a sort of guitar and used it to accompany himself, after cricket dinners, to sentimental songs of a maudlin order. On these occasions he did not merely get drunk. He acquired speechlessness, and escaped accident with what was the luck of an archangel. To see him after having played cricket in an inter-collegiate scouts’ match, waiting at his master’s supper table, rocking like a Yarmouth trawler, with an expression of the most episcopalian dignity, was one of the seven sights of the world. It was said that he was a married man and once or twice, in moments of curious expansion, he had referred to
my little woman. But over this matter he always shook his he…