Description
But for the existence of a little old chest, full of faded family letters and papers, it is unlikely that this story would nit have been written. The characters in it are men and women long dead, it is true, but more interesting surely than the cardboard figures of fiction, and, if the ambition of the authors be realized, brought to life in an atmosphere of the history book proper, for there is nothing cut and dried, or dry as dust about these old letters. They are as natural and vivid as the day they were penned, and shimmer still with the silvery sand used to dry their ink – ink faded now to the colour of last year’s leaves. At the end of two or three hours spent with these old papers, names before merely signatures, re-echo in one’s mind, while one sees perhaps, not the elaborate Army Commission before one – be-ribboned and sealed – but, with the mind’s eye, its proud recipient, very young and slender in his unaccustomed uniform. Or, it may be, the eager young man, father of the present owner of the little old chest, receiving his final instructions before embarking for Australia in his six months’ voyage in a sailing ship of that day. By Frank & Muriel Cameron (Clan History) and R A Bradfield (Colonial History)
Ref: 50947
