Page:The Story of the House of Cassell (book).djvu/180

 days—conversation being continually interrupted by the passage of locomotives close to the window. Our talk was of Napoleonic History, and I made some allusion to Marbot's Memoirs. 'What! You know your Marbot, do you—in the original, I hope?' he added sharply. When I admitted the soft impeachment he was greatly relieved. 'I am glad of that,' he said. 'You alarmed me for the moment, for I have just finished what I believe to be the first English translation ever done.'

"When my old friend Max Pemberton suggested Chums to the firm, he was not long down from Caius, full of energy, a keen boating man, and a great exponent of the old high bicycle. It was my privilege to write the first serial that appeared in that best of boys' papers, and turning over the earlier volumes to-day there is a breezy freshness about them that is truly Pembertonic. He afterwards edited Cassell's Magazine, and had an able coadjutor in poor Holderness Gale, who, alas! has 'gone aloft.'

"Retrospection is always sad work, and death has removed many once familiar faces from the famous old Yard. Ernest Foster, of the Saturday Journal; Bonavia Hunt, of the Quiver; John Hamer, the publisher; Archibald Forbes, the war correspondent; Colonel Knollys, Major Griffiths, John Augustus O'Shea—that fiery old Zouave and confirmed Fleet-Streeter, G. A. Sala, Sir Robert Ball the Irish astronomer, Sir Richard Temple—all these and many more I have met there and shall never meet again on this side of the 'Great Divide.' But happily others, though no longer at La Belle Sauvage, are still in the land of the living—Richard Kearton, accomplished naturalist and born poacher; S. H. Hamer, of Little Folks, affectionately known to his colleagues as Sam; and Frederic Whyte, who, among other works, edited 'Battles of the Nineteenth Century,' and whom it was an absolute pleasure to work for.

"I was a very young man when my first contribution