Lord Minto by John Buchan

SHORTLY before Melgund's marriage Lord Lansdowne was appointed Governor-General of Canada, and Melgund, an old schoolfellow and friend, was offered the post of military secretary. The offer was at once accepted, for it was a chance of service, and service overseas, and under conditions where he could be accompanied by his young wife. In his journal in September 1883 Melgund wrote: "I am at a loss how to recommence this journal, and am sadly interrupted by Mary. The world has altogether changed for me, and my humble establishment, 'Pepper' (his dog) and Harrington (his valet), has been transformed. I am very happy, and with Mary now lying on the sofa before me am vainly attempting to sum up this journal to the present date. " The revolution was complete, for the change from bachelordom was to be attended by the transference of his energies from sport and occasional soldiering to the grooves of official duties. The appointment was both military and civil: it was gazetted through the Colonial Office, accepted by the War Office, and published in the Army List, so that, as he told his brother Hugh, he went out as "recognized military secretary cocked hat and whole bag of tricks. " The honeymoon ended in a wild bustle of preparation, and at the end of September 1883 the Melgunds sailed for Canada. Family history was repeating itself. In 1837 Lady Melgund's father, then Colonel Charles Grey, commanding the 71st Regiment, embarked at Cork with his bride in a sailing vessel bound for Montreal, and after a fair weather voyage reached his destination in fourteen days, making a quicker passage than his brother-in-law, Lord Durham, the newly appointed Governor-General, who was a passenger in one of the first steamships to cross the Atlantic.

The change to new scenes came at a fortunate time for Melgund, for not only did it give his active mind an occupation, but it removed him from the unwelcome proximity of home politics. The Gladstone administration was becoming to him, as to many others of his type, a dark obsession. His letters to his mother in the year before her death are clouded with forebodings and solemn with execration. "The Turf is purest gold compared with politics, and the extraordinary thing is that gentlemen with heads on their shoulders should become so utterly warped. " Sometimes he made merry over it: "I write a line in the greatest haste, but I feel that you should instantly be made aware of the frantic excitement in political circles occasioned by yesterday's news in the press -- that there is strong reason to suspect that Gladstone and Dizzy were changed at nurse, and that Dizzy is Gladstone and Gladstone Dizzy. " But usually he was too depressed to joke.