“Read it!” said Everyone.  “Read what?” asked the Baron. “The Wrecker,” answered Everyone.  “I will,” quoth the Baron, promptly.  And—­it was done.  It took some time to do, but of this more anon.  The Baron’s time is fully occupied, never mind how, but fully, take his word for it.  A copy of The Wrecker was at once provided by its publishers, Messrs. CASSELL & Co., and the question for the Baron to consider, was not “What will I do with it?” but How, when, and where, will I read it?  Clearly ’twas no ordinary book.  Everybody was saying so, and what Everybody is saying has considerable weight.  A book not to be trained through at express pace, so that the beauties of the surrounding scenery would be lost, but something that when once taken up cannot be put down again, like the brass knobs worked by an electric-battery,—­something giving you fits and starts, and shocks, as do the electric brass-knobs aforesaid; something that, if you begin it at 4 P.M., exhausts you by dinner-time, and after dinner, keeps you awake till you read the last line at 2 A.M., and then tumble into bed parched, fevered, exhausted, but in ecstasies of delight, feeling as if you were the hero who had experienced all the dangers, and had come out of them triumphantly.

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Such were the Baron’s anticipations as to the joys in store for him on reading The Wrecker, by Messrs. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON and LLOYD OSBOURNE.  The Baron hit on a plan, he must isolate himself as if he were a telephone-wire.  “Good,” quoth he, “Isolation is the sincerest flattery,—­towards authors.”  The friend in need, not in the sense of being out at elbows, appeared at the right moment, as did the Slave of the Lamp to Aladdin.  “Come to my house in the mountains,” said this Genius, heartily; “come to the wold where the foxes dwell, not a hundred miles from a cab-stand, yet far far away,—­amid lovely scenery, in beautiful air, to quiet reposeful rooms, with the silence of the cloister and the jollity of the Hall where beards wag all, in the evening, when the daily task is done.”  “Friend REGINALD SYDE, I thank thee,” responded gratefully the Baron.  “I am there!” And in less time than it takes to go the whole distance in a four-horsed coach with a horn blowing and the horses blown, the Baron, travelling by special express, was there,—­all there!  The Authorities on the line made no extra charge for taking The Wrecker as luggage.

The weather was favourable for reading; an interminable downpour, when one is grateful for any book, even a Dictionary of Dates, or the remains of a Boyle’s Court Guide.  The Brave Baron shut himself into his room, laid in stores of tobacco and grog, decided, in the course of half an hour, on a comfortable position, and then laid himself out for the perusal, not to say the study, of The Wrecker.  Introductory Chapter excellent,—­appetising. “Oliver asks for more,” murmurs