sed. And let
it not be supposed that plenty of meaning cannot be thrown into the
'yours' alone. Take, for instance, the reply made by 'The' Macdonald,
when Glengarry claimed the chieftainship of the clan. 'As soon,' said
the former, 'as you can prove yourself my chief I shall be ready to
acknowledge you as such, but in the meantime I am yours, Macdonald.'
There, for once in a way, the 'yours' meant something.

When we go farther than the mere 'yours,' the possible variations are,
of course, endless. There is 'yours truly'--perhaps the most widely used
of all such combinations; but there are persons who rebel against its
tyranny, and who with daring originality substitute the heartier and
less conventional 'very truly,' 'most truly,' or 'right truly.' Second
only to 'yours truly' come 'yours faithfully' and 'yours sincerely,'
with their comparative 'very faithfully' and superlative 'most
sincerely;' and many people are well content to keep within the safe
borders of these wholly innocent and uncompromising forms. On the other
hand, less indifferent minds will go farther afield for their
qualifying adverbs, and say, with Sterne, 'very cordially yours,' or,
with Father Matthew, 'yours devotedly,' and so on. Whewell, asked once
for his autograph, signed himself 'yours autographically,' and of such
deviations there are abundant examples, mostly with a tendency to the
flippant. 'Yours ever' Byron declared himself to John Murray; 'yours
ever and evermore,' wrote Cowper to a friend; while Steele, in a letter
to his wife, protested that he was, with his whole heart, hers for
ever--which may be pronounced the best of the three.

But there is no reason in the world, to be sure, why we should cling to
the 'yours' in any shape or modification. There are multitudinous other
ways of being valedictory with effect. There is the simple word 'Adieu.'
'And so, my dear madam, adieu,' writes Pepys to a lady. 'With all my
love, and those sort of pretty things, adieu!' wrote the future Mrs.
Scott to her sweetheart, the Great Magician. And then there is the
English equivalent of the word--surely not less available. 'I wish you
were at the devil,' wrote Sir Philip Francis to Burke, 'for giving me
all this trouble, and so farewell!' In the old days, as we read in the
'Paston Letters,' they had a sufficiently formal fashion of concluding
epistles. 'By your cousin, Dame Elizabeth Brews'--'By your man, Thomas
Kela;' such are two examples of the cus