2110-4-10-14

17th September 1926.

THE SHEILING, SILVERDALE, CARNFORTH.

Dear Colonel Buchan,

I was happy in the sudden occasion that brought me to sit at your side at the Oxford Recitations and to hear that you had been so long cognisant of my work: and the only disappointment Oxford brought me was that I missed speaking with you again in the pleasant tumult and busy crosscurrents of the last night. I remember the first book you published (soon after you left Oxford), and your "South Countrie" (which I never saw - I mean the places, not the poem! - until this year) and "Fisher Jamie" often come into my mind.

So that I was contented to hear you too had had an eye on me all that time - though a little scared to learn that you had preserved (as well as scented out) those early booklings of mine which came into the world so shyly that I had begun to feel entitled to hope that no one had

noticed them.

I would your collection were not so complete: but as it is I feel a mischievous and self-annihilatory desire to make it completer; and I am sending with this a collection of odds and ends that I think may have escaped you, in the hope that you may care to add them to the rest.

From what you said I think you have the first edition of my collected plays: in which case you will not have the dedicatory poem for "Midsummer Eve," which was only added in the second edition and which seems to me one of my better poems. I had a few copies printed on larger paper for insertion in my own copies of the first edition; so I send one of these also, in the hope that you haven't seen it: and to it I am adding two plates of models made by my friend Paul Nash for "K. Lear's Wife" and "Gruach," which make rather nice frontispieces for my two play-books if you do not

mind the trouble of inserting them.

I wonder if you are at Letterewe or in Tweed- dale at this moment? We have seen both places for the first time this year, and I don't know which holds us more firmly: Letterewe has it for loveliness, perhaps (my only disparagement of it would be that it is on the wrong side of the loch for seeing Slioch); but Tweed-dale has an incomparable sweep, and the long array of its human associations weights the scale heavily. And we haven't seen it above Peebles!

Masefield asks me to return to Oxford next July: I trust I may sit next to you again. In the meantime, with my kind regards, I am yours sincerely

Gordon Bottomley.