New Spalding Club > House of Gordon > Gordons under arms

THE MAKING OF THE MUSTER. xxxix
suffered by it some young Rajput to lead his men with something like
Gordon's gallantry and determination."
If there has been romance in the careers of many Gordon officers,
there has also been romance in the discovery of it, producing an exhilara-
tion familiar to every student, but more or less incommunicable to the
ordinary reader. One of the moments is worth recalling, for it possesses
a literary as well as military value. All students of Carlyliana are
familiar with the story of Margaret Gordon, supposed to have been the
Seer's first love. Northern gossips had told and retold the story over
and over again, but not one of them ever discovered what Gordon she
was. One day, as Mrs. Skelton was immersed in her own work, Mr.
Ray C. Archibald, a young Professor of Mathematics in a Ladies' College
in Canada, discovered that the father of the girl was a Dr. Alexander
Gordon, an army surgeon. He followed this by a voyage across the
Atlantic, ran up and down the country in a few weeks, and enlisted
Mrs. Skelton's interest and help. It was really a terrible task, a look-
ing for a needle in a haystack ; and involved among other things a
search through seventeen unindexed War Office letter-books. But Mrs.
Skelton had the ultimate satisfaction of running the mysterious surgeon
to earth among the Gordons of Logic, while Mr. Archibald himself dis-
covered everything else that was worth discovering, the result being an
elaborate book of 230 pages, issued from the Bodley Head.
The elements of many another romance will be found scattered
through the pages of Gordons Under Arms, but Mrs. Skelton, with
an unfaltering perception of the true function of the New Spalding
Club, has denied herself the pleasure of exploiting the purple patches
for the more prosaic task of providing the warp and woof of hard fact.
The ideal she has pursued is the answer to the questions — Who is to
use this book ? How shall I help them quickly and efficiently ? Every
officer has been given an entry number, and referred to his father if in
the Services, or to a brother or some kinsman who was. Thus Alex-
ander Dunlop Gordon, 224, of the Croughly family, is described as the
son of William Alexander, 1474, but not as the brother of James John,
807, George Hantly,582, William Robert, 1511, and Rowland Hill, 1281,
who were all in the Army. It is only on referring to William Alex-
ander, 1474, the father of them all, that you learn those officers were
brothers. This plan has been adopted to save space, for with every
f