London Lavender

CHAPTER XIX

IN WHICH INADVERTENTLY I BECOME A PUBLIC CHARACTER AND, ALSO INADVERTENTLY, GIVE AN OPPORTUNIST AN IDEA

Mr. Furley overtaking me recently on my way into London asked if I should be in the neighbourhood of Parliament Square about a quarter to three.

"Be there if you can," he said.

As it happened I was lunching at Queen Anne's Gate, and so I did pass through the square at the time named, glanced at our legislators—or at men who wished to look like our legislators and be taken for them, and, as far as I was concerned, succeeded—entering the House, and so went on to Chelsea, whither I was bound, by the Embankment.

The next day Mr. Furley sent down a note to Naomi asking her to be sure to drop in at the Shakespeare Electric Theatre (shameless name!) in Tottenham Court Road, if she was in that neighbourhood. So we both dropped in, and there, suddenly, as a series of pictures representing the meeting of Parliament on the day of the great debate was thrown upon the screen, my blood turned cold, for among the other passers-by I saw myself. No one who has ever seen himself walk is likely to get over the shock, especially in the slightly accelerated gait of the cinema. Swift's "forked radish" does not compare as a reminder of littleness and mortality, and I am now convinced that Parliament should be approached either in cabs or on roller skates.

One sometimes wonders if the New World was not invented to destroy the mental balance of the Old. There is something sinister in the thought that America was discovered in the year that Lorenzo de' Medici died. With Lorenzo's life the richest period of generous and stimulating intellectual activity that man has seen—that revival of art and learning which we call the Renaissance—may be said to have come to an end. At that moment Columbus ran his prow against the land which was to produce in its greatest profusion everything which Giotto and his followers would most cordially condemn. Sitting in this picture palace, where my own gauche contours had been so disconcertingly sprung upon me, and watching scenes comic and scenes dramatic, carefully built up false stories of wild life and so forth, all passing dazzlingly across the sheet to the accompaniment of a clockwork obbligato and a piano, and all due to that amazing Edisonian inventiveness, I realized for the first time what a menace to human endeavour it has the chance of becoming, and how opposed to the humanist spirit. How many picture palaces London boasts I have no notion, but let us say at a hazard two hundred. Each is open from noon till eleven at night continuously, and each contains daily, let us say, six hundred persons. These figures are probably far too low, but they will serve. That makes twelve thousand persons for every day of the year (for they open on Sundays), in London alone, watching a mechanical device which illustrates the activities of others. Not an ounce of personality—just sheer hard mechanism, whose only purpose is to beguile, to prevent thought.

I have not said all this to Mr. Furley, but if I did he would agree with me; for, like all men who derive their livelihood from concerns that exist for the amusement of their fellows, he is a cynic.

The next time I met him after the Tottenham Court Road experience he had an amused expression. "How did you like it?" he inquired.

"It was horrible," I said. "But where was your photographer? I saw no one about."

He laughed. "Did you notice a small furniture van pulled up at the side of the road?" he asked. "If you had examined it closely you would have noticed a little hole at the back. The photographer was inside and the camera was at that hole."

We were walking through Regent's Park at the time of this conversation and suddenly I sneezed, and I can sneeze louder than most men. It was fortunate I did so, for it showed me Mr. Furley's brain in action. He stopped dead.

"By Jove," he said, "there's an idea!"

I asked him to explain.

"Why," he said, "for a film. A comic one. 'Mr. Splodgers catches cold,' or, if you like, 'The Fatal Sneeze.' You begin with Mr. Splodgers being caught in a shower and drenched; or falling into a river would perhaps be better. Anyhow, he gets wet through. Then you show him trying to prevent a cold. He tries everything, including the home Turkish bath, but in vain; the cold comes on. You see him in a sneezing-fit. The first sneeze brings down the chandelier, the second the bookcase, the third all the ornaments on the mantelpiece, the fourth the ceiling itself, and so on. It will be great. I'll arrange it right away. How would you like to be Mr. Splodgers?"

I declined.

"I must pay you for the idea, anyway," Mr. Furley continued. "What do you think would be fair? Five guineas?"

"No," I said; "the idea was yours. All that I did was to sneeze. I make you a present of it."

But you can't make a free gift to men like that. Although I was at home again in less than two hours I could not beat Mr. Furley's sense of reciprocity, and on my table was a package containing a hundred of the choicest cigars I ever owned.

CHAPTER XX

IN WHICH A NUMBER OF CRAFTSMEN DISCUSS THEIR PRACTICES, AND MR. LACEY DEFINES THE THINGS THAT MATTER

I took Lacey to the novelists' evening at Dabney's. "We'll just sit in a corner," I said, "and listen through the smoke. Unless, of course, you want to join in: I am quite certain I shall not."

"I shall join in if anyone is talking rubbish, of course," said Lacey quite simply, "just to put him right."

How jolly to be as sure of oneself as that!

"Well," I said, "I shall be silent. In fact, I have to be; because when I argue I am always converted, and that is so humiliating; or, at any rate, I recognize the truth in the other side's position. That is one disability; and another is that I am never sure of my spoken words. Give me a pen and whatever I say I will stand by; but when I talk I get led away."

"We must each go our way," said Lacey, "but, personally, when I find a man talking nonsense I sling him up."

Dabney's room was in full buzz when we arrived. Among the big guns present were Devon, the urbane reformer, with his warm heart, passionate sense of justice, his universal pity and fastidious taste; Speyde, the uncompromising analyst of the body and mind in revolt, and the friend of freedom; Leigh, the sentimental humorist or humorous sentimentalist of middle-class London; and Sankville, who writes provincial epics with a Dutch brush, but with the expansive view and detached tolerance of an arbiter throned on a star.

These were the best known; but there were others: younger men feeling their way towards fiction, some independent, some still wondering whom it would be wisest to imitate. Twenty years ago there was no doubt, since all the manuscript babies, when at last they were born, had a way of resembling Stevenson; but to-day there are new influences. Sankville, himself, for example, is one, and a powerful one. Everyone will soon be describing provincial birthplaces with minute fidelity—and nothing else! Speyde's manner and method it is less easy to catch: he is intensely individual; he has had no predecessors and will leave no school of writers. His influence is rather upon life than upon his own craft. Devon, again, is idiosyncratic. The appeal of his work is so largely dependent upon his point of view; and points of view are the only safe thing left: imitators have to be wary in stealing them. It is when manner and matter are both straightforward that the imitators have their most profitable time. Look, for example, at The Prisoner of Zenda, what a progeny has that romance!

Novel-writing has become a habit. Men used to write novels to amuse their fellow-creatures—to take tired people to the islands of the blest, as one of our finest living hands has put it—but to-day novel-writing has become a habit, resorted to for many different reasons. Some men write novels because they have got into a mess with a woman and want to see how it looks on paper, or to explain their real motives, or to find a way out. Other novels are really intimate letters intended for one reader only. Others—and these are largely those written by women—create the kind of life which the writer would have lived had she ever had the chance: exercises in what may be called the Consolation School of Fiction. But the greatest number are written because someone else wrote better, and the imitative faculty is so strong in us.

Of course there is only one thing for a novelist to be, and that is himself. But one has to attain a certain age to know that. To try to write in anyone else's manner is fatal. To novelists who have not the courage or the conceit to be themselves, but who try to infuse a popular element into their work, I would give this advice, "Do what you can as well as you can, and let the others do what you can't, without envying them." And when they have succeeded I would go to them again and say, "Never have the faintest fear of a copyist."

Devon and Sankville not only were novelists but successful dramatists too; but Speyde had had no luck with the stage.

"How you can do it, I can't think," he said. "It's a new language, a new world. Everything that one has learnt has to be forgotten. The things that should be whispered have to be shouted. At least, that is what the stage-managers and producers say, and since you are in their hands you have to believe it. But no more of it for me; I have done with limelight. Of course it's all right for Devon, because he's a homilist. Anyone with a lesson to teach can disregard conventions or accept them."

"That's all very well," said Devon, "but I must decline to be isolated as the one dramatist who has a moral to enforce. All the best dramatists have."

"Of course," said Sankville, "every Englishman is a Puritan at heart, in so far as he prefers that everyone else should be virtuous. Hence when he writes a play it naturally makes for virtue. The study of our neighbour's conduct is the national profession. It also forms the material of every play and every novel."

"And every newspaper," said Leigh.

"Of course—every newspaper, and every weekly review, doesn't it, Dabney?" Sankville replied.

"I suppose so," Dabney said; "but, at any rate, newspaper men don't pretend to do more than record results. They make no claim, as you novelists and dramatists do, to be able to read the heart and discern the springs of action and all the rest of it."

"Well, and can't we?" Sankville asked.

"Of course you can't," said Dabney. "It was at once one of the kindest and cruellest things that Heaven ever did to deny to human beings all capacity for really knowing anything about other human beings. You fellows can deceive us by your art into the illusion that you know; but that's all. Nobody knows. There's only one way, I take it, to write a psychological novel, and that is to proceed from yourself outwards. Done with courage and fidelity, that might give us one character that approximated to life; but you fellows crowd a hundred characters into each book. Someone once said, as a joke, that the way to write a novel was to make all the characters behave exactly as the author would, because we're all exactly alike, except that you yourself are a shade more imaginative and sensitive than anybody else. That was intended ironically, but I don't see any fault in it as a piece of practical advice. It has been successfully enough followed. But the result is not good enough—except as saleable stuff calculated to provide you with a motor-car, or a rock-garden, or whatever else you want.

"It is because no one can really know others and can only guess at himself in imaginary situations," Dabney continued, "that I think all this recurring talk about absolute freedom for the novelist is such rot. Speyde here is always claiming for the novelist an unfettered hand. Everything, he says, must be told. We must have full-lengths; not mere heads or kit-cats any more. For too long had novelists suffered under the restrictions placed upon them by Mrs. Grundy and the circulating libraries. No story of a man's or woman's life is worth telling unless it tells all; and so on. But, in my capacity as a provocative host, let me say I don't give a row of pins for it."

"Nor I," Lacey burst in. "If that's what the new novel is to be I shall return to my Dickens with the greater pleasure."

Speyde was indignant. "We are talking about novels," he said: "documents. Not panoramas. Dickens doesn't count here. Thackeray might have counted if he'd had a chance. You remember his complaint that since Fielding no one had been allowed to draw a whole man."

"Thackeray did very well without the dispensation," said Dabney. "As a matter of fact, I doubt if he could have gone further than he did; I doubt if anyone can go further than he does go: we all do our damnedest. I have always rather suspected that remark of Thackeray's: it was one of those hasty things which great men say and forget and some little twopenny-halfpenny listener remembers and sets down for ever. Given any imagination in the reader, he knows as much about Mr. Arthur Pendennis as there is any need for him to know, and surely you will admit that a novel is the work of the reader as well as the author."

"I quite agree," said Sankville. "A novelist's duty is to do his work within the limits imposed upon him. The English don't like certain things blurted out in their stories. Very well, then, the English novelist had got to say these things between the lines. Thackeray, who was about equally interested in cause and effect, did it most admirably; Meredith, who was rather more interested in cause than effect, did it better; Dickens, who was interested only in effect, left it alone. Nowadays there is a kind of competition among novelists as to which shall be boldest."

"Yes," said Dabney, "but the bore of it is, to those of us who know anything of life, that their boldness is such childish business. There is only one thing that they want to say, and we know exactly what it is. When Speyde talks about full lengths that's all he means. Nothing else. You would all save lots of time—if you will allow a mere journalist and frivolous novel-reader to make a suggestion—if you put at the beginning of your books a warning to the effect that the hero, heroine, and villain who are to be met in the pages that follow are human beings with the ordinary emotions. That, after all, is the only thing you want us to understand."

"Reverting to that matter of saying the more critically emotional or physical thing between the lines," said the quiet voice of Devon, "it might be laid down as an axiom—might it not?—that the success of a novelist in thus conveying these impressions without printing them is largely the proof of his excellence? It seems to me that the photographic reproduction of life which Speyde asks for requires totally different gifts from those of the novelist. Something of the statistician; much of the morbid anatomist."

"There's another thing," said Dabney, "that makes this realistic stuff a mistake, and that is that the English don't want the truth about anything. They never tell it and don't want it told to them. An appearance of truth—the ghost of truth—is all you need offer them."

But Speyde wouldn't have it. "No," he said. "English fiction has got to be freed, and the only way to do it is for the novelist to tell the whole truth, extenuating and suppressing nothing."

"Granting that for a moment," said Leigh, "it does not even then follow—with all the libraries clamouring for this kind of minute revelation—that the novel will come; because before there can be a novel there must be a novelist, and the novelist required here is one of stupendous genius."

"Quite right," said Dabney, "and you can bet that when the stupendous genius comes he will do exactly as he likes, just as, in fact, Shakespeare did, and Thackeray and Dickens and Meredith did. It is the little people who lay down and obey the rules; the big ones, who use the vintage inks, go their own gait. What England wants is not franker novels but a greater novelist. A measure of frankness is the heritage of us all, although we have a way of neglecting it, but greatness comes capriciously, and you may whistle for it in vain."

"Meanwhile," said Leigh, "let's go on writing just as we always do; because, in default of greatness, that pays best. That is to say," he said, "I will go on with my London fairy tales; and Speyde will go on with his exposures of the folly of the marriage laws; and Devon will go on with his thoughtful gentlemen and ladies in perplexity; and Sankville will go on throwing details in the eyes of the public. Oh, you minutiæ men, I don't believe in you a bit," he continued; "you have us all the time. We don't know where we are. We look for an impulsive human action, and tumble over the coal-scuttle."

Sankville laughed. "You can't visualize people until you've got their surroundings," he said.

"And then there's not time," replied Leigh. "Life is short, you know. Art can be too long."

"And what do you think of all this talk?" Lacey asked me.

"It's interesting," I said, "but it's only talk."

"That's just it," he replied. "They're always at it. They go on as if novels mattered."

"What does matter?" I asked.

"There you have me," he said, "but not novels, anyway. Paying your way matters. Not letting people down matters. Keeping a hold on yourself matters. But books, bless your heart, books! Books don't help you to real life, except possibly as an anodyne to take away the thoughts from facts—from Carey Street and things like that."

"Quite right," said Dabney, who had joined us; "and I would like to make every public man publish his truthful list of the things that matter. H.G. Wells, who one feels would seek the truth even in the cannon's mouth, once wrote a book called First and Last Things, a kind of spiritual stock-taking. That was some time ago, and his mind is so sensitive to progress and so receptive of ideas, drawing them from the air as Franklin's key drew electricity from the thunder-cloud, that he may by now have changed his opinions in many ways. None the less it was his creed at the time, expressed with all his mastery of unambiguous prose and his desire not to be misunderstood. It was his catalogue of the things that mattered. I remember thinking as I read it what an interesting and valuable thing it would be if some such confession—some such diploma thesis of unburdenment—was demanded of every statesman and author. Such an exaction would, at any rate, help to stem the Scotch competition in public life."

CHAPTER XXI

IN WHICH WE WATCH AN IMPULSIVE GOOD SAMARITAN'S DEEDS AND HEAR HIS SELF-REPROACHES

Lacey and I walked back together, and in Kingsway we were overtaken by Spanton, who had been to a debate at Essex Hall. I observed at once that he and Lacey were antipathetic. It was quite natural, for both are vigorous in their beliefs or impulses, and they look at life from totally different points of view. Lacey is a sentimentalist with roots in the past; Spanton is a scientific state-builder with his eyes on the future. Lacey is disillusioned and tired, content to get through each day as well as he can, expecting little. Spanton is confident and resolute.

On our way through Russell Square we passed a girl leaning against the railing of a house, crying. She was dressed in tawdry finery and her left hand was bound in a handkerchief. Lacey was at her side in a moment.

"What's it all about?" he asked, in his hearty, kind voice.

Amid her sobs she told the story. She had had a quarrel with her man; he had struck her; the table fell with the things on it and she fell too, on a broken glass. He had turned her out.

Lacey examined her hand, which was badly cut and still bleeding.

"We must get this bound up," he said, and we found a cab and drove to a chemist's in New Oxford Street which is open all night, as, of course, Lacey knew.

"And what is the next thing?" he said. "Where do you live?"

"I couldn't go back there," the girl said, clinging to him.

She was a fine girl, rather on the coarse side, with a dull red complexion, thick lips, and blunt nose; but her large, dark-brown eyes were really splendid.

Lacey comforted her and reassured her, stroking her other hand.

Spanton said nothing.

There had been quarrels before, she explained, and the man's brutality had been increasing. This was the last. Nothing would get her there again.

"Very well, then," said Lacey, "we must find you a bedroom, and to-morrow I will see what I can do. It is too late now to talk."

He thought a while and then told the cabman to drive to a street off the Hampstead Road.

"When I was in business," he said, "I had an old carpenter named Dimmage. I dare say he's got a room empty; we shall just catch him coming home after the 'Time, gentlemen, please.'"

Lacey was right. Mr. Dimmage had just returned and was locking up. His delight—rendered a shade more exuberant by his evening's libations—at recognizing his old employer was a joy to watch.

The story was soon told, and Mrs. Dimmage, extricated from bed, appeared, dishevelled and testy, at the head of the narrow stairs. She descended for the purpose of scrutinizing the girl a little more closely under the candle-light, and then retreated again.

"We've no room here," she said.

(It is an open question whether women are not au fond women's worst enemy.)

"But what about that truckle-bed where Jim used to be?" said the tactless but hero-worshipping Dimmage.

"There's no room in this house for stray women at this time of night," said Mrs. Dimmage.

Mr. Dimmage looked at us blankly.

"But, I say," he said, "it's a favour Mr. Lacey's asking. You wouldn't deny Mr. Lacey anything? After all he's done for us, too;" and he went upstairs and engaged in whispered conversation.

"You are good to me," said the girl, who still clung to Lacey's arm. "You'll come round in the morning, won't you? You're one of those that do keep their promises, aren't you?"

"Yes, worse luck," said Lacey. "But you've not got your room yet."

"Oh yes, I have," she said. "She's getting it ready now."

The girl was right. Mrs. Dimmage was conquered, as Mr. Dimmage informed us with many winks and grimaces.

"She's a good old soul," he said confidentially, "but damned partickler. But it'll be all right now."

And so we left, Mr. Lacey promising to be there at half-past nine.

"I call that a triumph for alcohol," he said, as we walked on. "If Dimmage had been a teetotaller we should never have got in. He would have been asleep, for one thing, and for another he would have had no courage to stand up to his wife. Alcohol is always called the friend of vice, but I have often found it the friend of virtue too."

All this while Spanton had been looking grimly on; and when we came away he at last spoke.

"It's a waste of time and energy, Mr. Lacey. All that you've done is to keep us out of our beds and reduce our store of vitality. There's no sense in helping a woman like that. She's no good to Society. She's a parasite. If you had an impulse to do something for her the best thing would have been to give her a shilling and leave her."

"Oh, rubbish," said Lacey. "We must do as we're made. I couldn't leave a poor creature like that. Common humanity wouldn't let me."

"That's because you don't reason," said Spanton. "If you had thought for a moment instead of being so impulsive you would have realized that you were doing no good—in fact, only being self-indulgent. We have no right to go about the world squandering our emotions on worthless strangers. We ought to control and direct them, to help those that are worth helping."

"That's a counsel of perfection," said Lacey. "I am not perfect. I am just an ordinary person with a heart not made of logic or stone. If I see anyone in a hole I like to try and get them out. That's not self-indulgence, is it?"

"Almost always," said Spanton.

"Well, it's Christianity," said Lacey, "and that's good enough for me."

"Yes, but Christianity won't work," said Spanton. "It's never worked yet. Look at our army. Look at our navy. Look at our archbishops' salaries. Is there any connection between them and Galilee?"

"Rubbish," said Lacey. "Why, of course, Christianity works. It makes our conduct. And if you don't stop this vile talk I'll punch your head;" and so saying he stood still and began to take off his coat.

"All right," said Spanton, "I'll stop. But just see how true it was, what I said about Christianity not working. You've already forgotten the instruction about the other cheek."

A most irritating young man.

But Lacey was quick enough for him. "Of course I shouldn't do anything so abject as that," he said. "My Christ is he who scourged the money changers out of the Temple. Come on!"

"That girl's an awful nuisance," said Lacey to me a day or so after. "She's fallen in love with me. I was afraid she would. It's my destiny to attract the wrong women. She's just a poor dumb animal full of gratitude, and I haven't a notion what to do about her. Your cold-blooded young Socialist is right: one should repress one's humanitarian impulses."

I asked him what he should do.

"I'm wondering," he said. "She wants to be my servant and work herself to death for me. I can see the twins' faces when they find her cleaning up my room! There's only one phrase with the twins for that kind of girl—'brazen hussy.' What the good women will never understand about these others is that even in brazen hussying there are off moments when ordinary life has to be lived. Fortunately she doesn't know my address and old Dimmage won't tell her. I shall send her five pounds and say I have to go abroad for three months, and so wash my hands of her."

I strongly advised him to do this and offered to contribute to the sum. But he wouldn't have it.

"No," he said, "this is my show. I let myself in for it, and I must get out of it. Poor girl, I'm so sorry for her. Such a nice thing too; but hopeless, of course. When they've once tasted freedom they won't go back. How can they? What has service to offer? Do you remember how in one of Byron's letters he bursts out in disgust, 'Nothing but virtue pays in this damned world.' He was right. Nearly everyone is experimenting with vice, yet nothing but virtue really pays. The difference between virtue and the other thing may be as slight as tissue paper, but there it is, and all our social system is based on virtue. Such a nice girl too. She ought to marry a policeman and beget life-guardsmen.

"There's a poem in that Chinese book you lent me," Lacey continued, "which I have learnt by heart and am trying to obey. It teaches one not to meddle. This wretched girl who is on my mind all comes of meddling, just as Spanton said. The poem—it's hundreds of years old—runs like this—it is quite short—only four lines:

I wander north, I wander south, I rest me where I please...
See how the river-banks are nipped beneath the autumn breeze!
Yet what care I if autumn's blasts the river-banks lay bare?
The loss of hue to river-banks is the river-banks' affair.

That's the way to live. Go your own way and don't care a hang for anyone. I wish I could do it!

"That poem's given me an idea too. To make a little collection of poems all of which are four lines long and no more. You'd get some fine things and it wouldn't tire anyone. Some day, when I've more time, I shall do this."

But, of course, he won't.

CHAPTER XXII

IN WHICH THE WYNNES AND OURSELVES MAKE A JOURNEY TO ITALY AND FIND THE MIDDLE AGES

Since the events described in the last chapter I have been a traveller. I forget if I have mentioned that Naomi has a brother Frank, a journalist, with a pretty wife and three children. We do not see very much of them, as they live out of London, but these children having been ordered the best kind of sea bathing, and Mr. Wynne—Frank, and Naomi's father—having generously put his hand deep into his pocket, and Naomi having talked me round, we all went to Rimini to bathe; because good authorities said that Rimini bathing was of the superlative best.

When I had at last consented I began (as often happens) to be enthusiastic. I used to go about London saying "Rimini, Rimini," just for the sheer joy of the syllables. For I can think of no other three, in that Italian language of beautiful syllables, that contain the suggestion of so much that is splendid and old and romantic. I pictured it on the grand scale, a little as though Hugo had sketched it, noble but decayed. I saw a crumbling fortress, an empty palace, vast, sun-baked streets, a cool, twilit cathedral, and dark doorways and passages in which the clash of steel was still almost audible. That is how I began; but gradually, as I met travellers and conversed with them, these poetical anticipations lost their fine bloom.

Said one: "It's the very dickens of a place for mosquitoes."

Said his son, a healthy schoolboy, who was present: "I believe it's near San Marino. If I give you a couple of bob will you buy me some stamps?" (What a lot the young know!)

"If you are going to Rimini," said Dabney, "you must get Symonds and read up the Malatesta lot. They're awfully interesting. But perhaps you're going to write about them."

"No," I said, "I think not. I'm going to Rimini solely for bathing and mosquito bites."

A Scotch physician gave me advice of a different and totally unexpected variety. "Don't forget the Rimini beer," he said. "It's the best I ever tasted."

Rimini beer! Shade of Dante! But the doctor was right. The Rimini beer is wonderful, especially with the Rimini sun to create a thirst for it. Apollo and the brewer (who has, I regret to say, a German name) working in partnership can always lead to admirable results, but never more admirable than at Rimini.

One lady alone played the game. She threw up her hands in an ecstasy. "Rimini!" she crooned. "How delightful! Paolo and Francesca."

But the prettiest thing was said in a letter from a literary friend. "Lucky you!" he wrote, "and if you stay till October you will see the swallows and get some English news, for they always rest at Rimini on the way south."

Our party was enormous and a tremendous responsibility for me, who foolishly undertook to pilot it; for, in addition to ourselves, who knew a little French and Italian, there were two maids who knew none, one of them being the children's nurse, and the other Mrs. Wynne's new maid, who was advertised for as not objecting to going abroad, and replied that she was "fond of travail."

I pass over the horrors of the journey. No one who vividly remembered his railway experiences would ever go to Italy again; but Providence has a kindly way of blurring them or relegating them to a distant background behind Italian joys. One quaint experience the last stage offered. In the confusion of Bologna's crowded platforms, and the absence of any official who knew anything, and the lateness of our train, and the changing into the next, which was, like all Italian trains, packed with passengers before we could reach it, there had been no opportunity that I considered safe to buy any refreshments. As, therefore, the appalling journey lengthened out between Bologna and Rimini, where the line hits the Adriatic coast and thereafter clings to it for many miles, we were all conscious of the pangs of hunger.

In despair I explored the train for food, hoping against hope, and came upon a peasant in a corner with a basket at his feet from which oozed a thick fluid. That it would prove to be inedible I was confident; but none the less I asked him what it was, and behold, when he opened the mouth of the basket it was eggs. To his immense astonishment I led him to the compartment which we had at last obtained, and, to his greater surprise, he watched us each consume one or more of his eggs broken into the cup of a pocket flask. Even Naomi, whose horror of a raw egg amounts in England to a mania, took one; even the children took one, with a reverence and distortion proper only to medicine.

The strange part of the story, which otherwise lacks all the elements of excitement, is, that when I offered the man some money he refused it. It had given him pleasure to be of use to us, he said. He would on no account accept any payment. Noble egg-merchant of Rimini, may you have many children, and may they have many children, and so come to repopulate and regenerate Italy! But, he said, if we really wished to make some return, he would greatly esteem a taste of the liquor which the flask contained and which some of us had poured into the broken eggs. I therefore handed him a cup of the national beverage of Caledonia, which he took at a gulp, and the last we saw of our good Samaritan was his honest, sunburned face in spasms of astonishment at its strength, and the last we heard of him was his strangling gasps as he fought with the unaccustomed draught. I looked for him after in Rimini but never saw him more.

And so, after many many hours in grubby carriages, we reached Rimini late at night, which is the right thing to do, and in that dazed state that follows sudden entry in the dark into a strange town, after a fatiguing and noisy train, we were driven through narrow streets to the hotel: having chosen, for fun, the ancient posting-house of the centre rather than the new and splendid hostel of the plage. In spite of certain disabilities I think we were wise, for it made just the difference between being in Rimini and being anywhere—Ostend, say, or Dieppe—for all plage hotels are the same and all ancient posting-houses have their own character.

The Golden Eagle and Three Kings was our magnificent sign and we completely captured it. We had vast rooms in which gilt beds with canopies over them (like royal couches in a fairy tale) occurred as incidents, isolated as palm trees in the desert; while the gaily-painted ceilings were high above as the vault of heaven. Such a thing as a small room was unknown. The hostess was shrewd and masterful, with all the machinery of geniality. The host was not only landlord but housemaid, parlour-maid, cellar-man, and everything else. Heavy, pallid, puffy, and unbuttoned, with a kind face and a heavy moustache, he was to be met with on the stairs at all hours, carrying either a broom or a pail or both. We called him (Heaven forgive us!) the Golden Eagle; but his consort was liker that commanding and predatory fowl. In addition there was an odd man or two in an apron, also busy with brooms and pails, and also the natural objective of the eagless's criticism; a head waiter (from Florence, for the season); a piccolo, who smiled ever and longed to be up to mischief but dared not; a kitchen staff; and two or three prim and superior daughters, or eaglets, glimpses of whom were occasionally to be caught in the hotel, avoiding their father, and whom, with their efficient mother, all in black, we met more than once returning from Mass. Such was the personnel of the Golden Eagle and Three Kings.

But at lunch and dinner sparkling young commercial travellers appeared from obscure regions of the building inaccessible to us, where no doubt the rooms approximated to the English size, and these would surround a long table and eat and drink and incessantly talk; but always first executing some courteous preliminaries from which emerged the senior, to take the head of the table.

Rimini has but this one hotel of any class at all, and one café, and this café, I observed, has but one habitué who wears evening dress; but he is so proud of it that his unceasing promenade before the little tables outside conveys the illusion of a Smart Set.

The city, I may say at once, is not the city of my dreams. I do not say it is disappointingly not so, for everything about it is so foreign and so interesting and (with the exception of the plage, the railway, and the trams) so mediæval—such a feat of survival—that it is satisfying even to one who had expected too much. The town itself is small and half derelict, and a long way (in hot weather) from the sea. On the shore, for a mile and more, is a new settlement of villas and bathing-boxes, a casino and the great white à la mode hotel. This mile, inhabited wholly by strangers, comes to life in June and dies again in September, and has no dealings with the old town and the Golden Eagle and Three Kings whatever. Nor has the old town any dealings with the shore, for no one living at Rimini ever bathes. The only way in which old Rimini recognizes the sea is to circulate round the bandstand on Sundays and musical nights, otherwise it prefers to crumble in the sun, and recks nothing of salt water.

Rimini's streets are narrow and paved with stones chosen carefully for their unsuitability for such a purpose. Its houses are high and squalid, but most charmingly sheltered with green. Its palaces are now rookeries. The main street is entered from the plain through a massive gateway—the Porta Romana—and passing through the town widens first into an arcaded oval, with a monument in it celebrating Cæsar's crossing of the neighbouring Rubicon in 49 B.C., then narrows again; then becomes the side of the principal square, the Piazza Cavour, where the theatre, the post office, the Municipio, the café, and the one suit of evening clothes are; then narrows again to pass the Golden Eagle and Three Kings; and after a further narrow period leaves the town by way of a stone bridge with five arches over the Marecchia, which was begun before Christ by Augustus and finished by Tiberius in A.D. 20; and so once more we enter the plain again. There are a few by-streets and the castle of the Malatestas and an amphitheatre, within the walls; and that is all. And everything has the disintegrating baked appearance of a city with a past.

The famous cathedral has a façade as unfinished and untidy as a peacock from behind, and it is usually deserted; but it is Rimini's best, still. Interesting to loiter here and ruminate upon its makers: chief of them the black Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, who built it, not only as a service for a God whom he too often forgot, but as a fitting resting-place when that orgy, his life, was over. His story is a dark one. He was born in 1417 and died in 1468. His imperious hawk-shaped head tells us that he could brook no opposition, and throughout his tempestuous career he did everything he wished, as Italian tyrants of the Middle Ages were peculiarly able to. Three wives at least he espoused and then murdered, but at last fell completely under the charm of the fair and gifted Isotta degli Atti, who had enough influence with him to force him to marry her and enough good fortune to survive him.

Sigismondo as a bold bad man has almost no superior in the annals of wilfulness and turpitude, but alongside his abnormal cruelties and excesses was a devotion to art and philosophy which not only led him to invite Alberti here to design, and the sweet and simple Piero della Francesca to paint, and certain of the best sculptors to carve, his cathedral—but he entertained scholars and poets continually in his city of lawless passions, and himself brought hither from Greece the bones of the famous Neo-Platonist, Gemisthos Plethon, the father of the New Learning, and reinterred them in state in this Christian fane. Strange lurid times and strange anomalies in them!

Sigismondo's tomb, with the elephant pertaining to his crest, and Isotto's tomb near it (with Isotto herself as an angel on the altar) were both constructed in their lifetime and must have been visited continually by their intended occupants to see what progress was being made. His own tomb bears a cynical couplet which, with his descriptive name, sufficiently describes the man for posterity.

As for the most famous figures in Rimini, those two fated lovers of whom Dante first sang—Paolo and Francesca—one hears nothing of them in the city to-day, and sees only picture post-cards representing a modern meretricious painting of the hapless pair. It was an ancestor of Sigismondo (he himself left no lawful descendants), Giovanni the Lame, who was the husband of Francesca. And Francesca loved too well her husband's brother Paolo the beautiful, and Giovanni had both of them put to death in 1288, when Dante was a young man of twenty-three.

But the sweetest and rarest life to think upon in this forsaken temple is that of its architect—Leon Battista Alberti, the first Admirable Crichton of a period when Crichtons were almost the rule. Of noble birth, Alberti developed his many-sided genius very early. He controlled the wildest horses almost by a word; he could jump his own height without a run; he could throw a coin accurately over the tallest building; none could beat him at wrestling or archery; he painted, modelled, and was a superb musician. To his skill and taste as an architect this cathedral testifies, as do the façade of S. Maria Novella at Florence and the old Ruccellai palace there. He dived deeply into physical science, read everything that was readable in those early days before printing, was among the keenest of the Neo-Platonists, and, like Leonardo after him, a mountaineer. He worshipped beautiful things, jewels, flowers, landscapes, and was peculiarly delighted by the spectacle of healthy and handsome old men. When one of his dogs died he wrote a funeral oration for it. Among his literary works were a treatise on the family, essays on art and science, and an autobiography. Like Michael Angelo and Leonardo, his greatest successors, he never married, and his wealth was always at the disposal of his friends. Such was Leon Battista Alberti, the builder of this cathedral, who was dead nine years before our Edward V came to the throne.

Neither universal genius nor tyrant is to be found in Rimini to-day. The cathedral is forlorn and deserted; the castle of the Malatestas is a prison; no fierce or genial despot stirs the languid populace to activity. They loaf about in deshabille, gossip, sip their coffee, read the papers, and care for nothing. Sun-beetles, every one of them; that is, in summer. I cannot conceive of Rimini in winter at all.

But the girls of Rimini. Ah! Olive coloured, with regular features a little rounded, tall, straight, with level eyes that never wander, they are the most beautiful things there. They walk proudly in couples, talking, laughing; they are never seen with men. They come along so statelily and easily, like sailing ships. At other times they look out of the windows, but still never at men. Where else are beautiful women so disdainful?

CHAPTER XXIII

IN WHICH WE LUXURIATE IN A TIDELESS SEA AND WITNESS A BLOODLESS BATTLE

Let me say at once that not only is the Rimini bathing the best in the world, so far as I know, but the sands are the best too; and the fishing-boats that flit in and out of the little harbour have the best burnt-umber sails.

The English are learning to enjoy plage life, but they are not naturally ready for its beguilements as the French and Italians are; while the Germans, after their wont, overdo it, with a coarse self-consciousness and their always visible intention of extracting the last drop of material bliss. The Italians are children in the water and on the sands: the dark, hairy men, the placid, olive-hued women with subterranean fires. At Rimini, where it is really hot, one lives all day in bathing clothes, alternately in the water and out; but from twelve to one everyone is eating, and from one to three everyone is asleep—except the indefatigable children. In those hours the sands under the tent awnings present the appearance of a battle-field, strewn with the prismatic dead. This to the human eye; to the eye of a sand insect the scene must be more like the South Downs to a Wealden labourer, such are the undulating contours of the full-length Italian parents who repose in profusion and negligence on every hand.

These parents were more entertaining to me than any of the younger bathers: they were so patiently happy; so sensibly careless of their habiliments; so wisely unmindful of their bulk; such creatures of comfort. Their pretty daughters and slender sons had their vanities; the parents were without any.

I had often wondered when abroad what kind of impression one makes. All these swarthy Italian men, for example, looked like tenors: but what type did I, for instance, suggest to the Italian eye, if any? There are many more casts of face in England than in Italy, and several more than in France; and now that whiskers have gone out and clean shaving is the fashion it must puzzle the continental caricaturist to fix the English type. But of one thing I feel certain, that our little party broke no hearts. No dark Italian eyes looked yearningly our way: the Carusi will always win there.

Few of the Italians, young or old, thought of swimming. Their pleasure was to stand about or make lazy voyages on the double-canoe rafts, meanwhile carrying on conversations with their tent at terrific range. Only the English or an eccentric native thought of swimming, and the English, so far as I know, were confined to our own party.

I say we were the only English; but is that quite just? For on the first morning, while I was arranging with the bathing master in his little guichet for our tickets and so forth, he sent for one of the bathing men to be our particular attendant, on the grounds that he was English, or, at any rate, knew English. "The Englishman," therefore, he became in our minds; but what English! He had one word—"awry"—which meant the very opposite, "All right," and this he used continually. He could also say "ole man." No more. The secret of his reputation as a linguist was a sojourn he had made in San Francisco; but it is extremely easy, I take it, in San Francisco, to consort only with your own countrymen, no matter what race is yours, and therefore avoid the necessity of learning any new tongue. The Englishman, however, was our friend. He taught the children to swim; he placed his double canoe at our exclusive disposal at a heavy cost; he fixed the awning of the tent; he procured additional deck-chairs; he brought bottles.

And once he fought for us. During his momentary absence one morning we had received some attention from another of the men, and the Englishman had heard about it. Such a liberty was, of course, outrageous and must be punished; and the Englishman set to work to chastise this upstart and interloper. The attendants had cubicles at the head of the little pier, side by side, and the Englishman and his foe chose this site for their battle, for all the world to see. They began by calling each other names at a distance of a yard; then they closed up and shouted these and other names into each other's very mouths. Then they took to fisticuffs. Not, however, in any vulgar northern way, upon each other's body, but on the doors and walls of each other's cubicle. They fought like this for ten minutes, beating the woodwork mercilessly, every blow being accompanied by a new epithet, which it is fortunate was not in any language that we understood; and then they disappeared within, each in his own lair. For a while there was silence, to the intense regret of the plage, but not for long; for the Englishman would think of something good which he had not yet called the other, and would come out and call it him, with a knock-out blow on the panel; and the other would remember a terrible insult which had been hurled at him a year or two ago and which, in the excitement of the past few minutes, had escaped his memory, and he would fire this into the Englishman with an undercut on the pitch pine. They came out so rhythmically that one could almost believe they were consulting slang dictionaries in the meanwhile; and then the warfare gradually died down, as the dictionaries gave out, and in half an hour they were in friendly intercourse again. From the circumstance that the other man ever after avoided us, we gathered that the Englishman had won.

CHAPTER XXIV

IN WHICH AN EXPERIMENT IS MADE IN QUICKENING THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE YOUNG, WITH DISTRESSING RESULTS

Mrs. Frank, I have not perhaps said, is one of the serious mothers who wish to make her children clever from the very first, and she has enlisted my services in the campaign, although I am not clever yet. We all stay on the sand until four, and then there are two hours for the twins and their small sister before bedtime. It is this interlude which Mrs. Frank has entreated me to spend now and then, say three times a week, in instruction.

"Be original with them," she says, "there's a good Kent. Make them think and see."

"Heavens, woman," I reply, "why not save time by telling me to be perfect? What's their father about, anyway? Why isn't he teaching his brood?"

"Oh, Frank's too lazy," says his wife. "Besides, he hasn't any patience. He hates to be interrupted with questions—not a little because he can't answer them."

I am lazy too, and am equally afraid of questions, but it has long been understood in this world that I cannot say no, while ever since I took charge of Mr. Bemerton's shop I have been the natural prey of all mendicants. Moreover, Naomi supporting her sister-in-law's request, I had to say yes once more.

I borrowed my plan from Spanton. You remember what he said about his school lectures and his description of the lives of the labourers. Well, I took that as a basis, and, applying the idea to younger minds, began a little story for these children which should have the effect of making them realize, although so young, their dependent position in the world, and their indebtedness to the world and its workers not only for their luxuries but their necessities. At first it would be merely a matter of curiosity quickened and satisfied, but later, as they grew older and went to school, it might make them the more ready not to harbour insularity and arrogance.

We had a chapter at a time. My story began thus:

WHAT THE WORLD DOES FOR PRUE

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Prue. Or, to be more exact, there is a little girl named Prue, for she is living in London at this minute and is still only ten years old. Prue has no brothers and sisters, but I don't think that this matters very much to her happiness, for she has many friends, not only of her own age but bigger too, quite grown up, in fact, and also a very busy mind which leads her to be interested in a large number of things and so keeps her contented. Her father goes into London in the morning at half-past nine by the Hammer-Smith Tube from Gloucester Road, and he comes back in the afternoon so exactly at the same time every day that Prue can be sure of meeting him by the greengrocer's and florist's on the way, where he buys some flowers for Prue's mother, who is an invalid. On Saturday, however, he does not go to his business at all, but in the morning he plays at golf in the Old Deer Park at Richmond (close to Kew Gardens), and in the afternoon he takes Prue to a picture gallery or a concert. On Sunday afternoons they always go either to the South Kensington Museum, which they are getting to know by heart, from Constable's water-colours of Brighton to Michael Angelo's "David," and from teak houses at Benares to lace caps for babies in the time of Queen Anne; or to the British Museum, which they know also equally well, from the Elgin Marbles to the little Tanagra family groups in terra-cotta, and from Egyptian mummies to Staffordshire jugs with poetry on them. You have no idea how interesting a museum can be if you take it easily and have someone to describe the things to you. The mistake people make in museums is to try and see too much, as if they were going to die to-night.

Prue also has a governess named Miss Fry, and a considerable library of her own, and a dachshund named Herr Bandy, and threepence a week pocket money. She has fair hair and blue eyes, and would much rather be laughing than not, in spite of her visits to museums. And that, I think, is enough introduction to Prue.

The purpose of this story is to give you the same idea as that given to Prue by her father, of the thanks which you owe to the world at large; and when I say you I mean all of us, but particularly those living at this moment in England. For I want you to think of Prue as a little girl standing on England in the flat map of the world which we call Mercator's Projection, to whom from all directions steamers and trains are hurrying. Each of these steamers and trains is bringing her something that is necessary for everyday life, to eat or to wear or to use, and were it not for these steamers and trains, and the sailors and engineers on them, and stevedores who loaded them and others who will unload them, and the workmen who made or dug or gathered the articles they are loaded with, that little girl would very likely die or, at any rate, be no better than a savage. And again when I say that little girl I mean you and me and all of us prosperous, protected, English people who have only to go into the Stores and lay down our money to get all we want, and, for the most part, never think of the way in which men have been toiling under hot suns or freezing skies or in stifling cities, mostly on poor wages, to provide us with it. We take such things for granted: just as Prue did until her eccentric Uncle Frank, who always did such odd things, came back from India, where he was a judge, for a holiday, and told her a little about the origin of things, as I am going to tell you.

That was the start, and it was very successful, except that the twins both wondered why I had made a little girl the heroine.

"Well," I said, "it is because girls are more interesting. I wrote it really for Jill, only she is too young for it at the moment. Little boys don't make such good stories as little girls."

"Why?" they asked.

"Ah," I replied (for I am not altogether a fool), "you must ask your father. He knows everything."

Now for the real beginning, the first chapter:

It was a bright morning in April. Prue woke up at seven, half an hour before she need get up. This is a very pleasant thing to do. She knew it was seven because she looked at her watch. Her watch! This is rather serious, because few things that we use in daily life contain the results of more labour in many countries than a very ordinary watch, and if I tell you all about that now, we shall not get back to Prue for many pages. I had forgotten that Prue's watch would come in so soon. Let us then postpone the examination of her watch for a little, because I want to tell you how she began to think of this dependence of hers (and ours) upon the rest of the world. She lay there in her little bed all cosy between the sheets and blankets. (Sheets and blankets, did I say? This story is not only never going to end, I can see, but is never going to begin either, for Prue's sheets jump us straight away to Carolina in North America, and the cotton fields, and the negroes at work there, and the great Atlantic steamers being laden with the bales, and the Lancashire cotton mills, and the girls in clogs, and the boys thinking of football as they work, and the broad, Lancashire dialect filling the air, and ... do you see what a task we have before us? While as for Prue's blankets, they take us farther still, right away to Australia, to a great sheep farm with thousands and thousands of sheep, and the hot sun, and the dry Bush stretching as far as the eye can reach, and the rouseabouts driving the sheep up to the shearing sheds, and rows of half-naked men shearing and shearing, with the sheep kicking and struggling beneath them. Think of the heat of it all, and the dust and thirst and weariness, and nothing to do when evening comes in this wilderness but rest and get ready for the next day! And then the despatch of the wool in wagons to the nearest train, and the train going to the port and the long voyage to the factory in England where it is to be spun. How many sheep's warm coats contributed to make one of your blankets? You never thought of that before, perhaps. But still we have not reached the awakening of Prue's consciousness on this great matter of herself and the world.)

She lay there in that blessed half-awake, half-asleep state for some minutes, until she began to feel something warm on her cheek, and realized that it was the sun. And she suddenly thought how wonderful it was that there should be such a substance as glass which can keep out the cold but lets light and warmth through it, and, idly thinking, she began to wonder how glass is made, and when it was discovered, and what people did before they had it, and either how draughty or how dark their rooms must have been; and she determined to ask her father and Miss Fry about it; and that was the beginning of this story.

From the window as she lay there, her eyes strayed all round the room, and everything that they saw set her wondering afresh. It was a very nice little bedroom. The wall-paper was white, with little bunches of wall-paper flowers tied with blue ribbon all over it—the kind of wall-paper that does not look like anything but what it is and is therefore happy and restful, and very different from the wall-paper that was there when Prue had measles last year. That had a curly, twisted pattern on it which, when Prue had fever, turned into animals and frightened her; and then it was badly hung in some places, and Prue would lie there for hours wishing that it fitted and longing to get up and alter it. But the new paper was gay and properly pasted on, and Prue liked it very much.

On the walls were a few pictures—one or two coloured ones from the Christmas numbers in cheap frames (glass again!) and the "Angels' heads," by Sir Joshua Reynolds from the National Gallery, and the little King Philip on his pony, by Velasquez, from the Wallace Collection, and an illuminated text from Aunt Mildred, very beautifully done in gold and water-colours—"The Lord is my Shepherd," and a Shakespeare date calendar. There were ornaments on the mantelpiece—a gaily-painted wooden figure from Munich, two Japanese vases, a tiny cat and a tiny dog in brass, painted just like life, from Vienna, and a serpentine cup from the Lizard. In the fire-place was coal and wood all ready to be lit when Prue had a cold. Before the window was her dressing-table with a mirror over it, and her brush and comb and so forth on little mats with fringe round them. Then there were the curtains, and the blind, and the wardrobe of white wood with a little painted pattern, and the chest of drawers, and the washing-stand with soap and toothbrush and so forth, and the chairs. There was also a little hanging bookshelf, and on the floor was a bright green carpet.

Prue lay in her little brass bed and looked at these things one by one while the sun continued to pour through the windows and the time to get up came nearer and nearer. And all the while she was getting up she was thinking about these things, and how they were made, and where they came from, and when she came downstairs she told her father about it.

We have seen something about the origin of the sheets and the blankets of Prue's bed. But what about the mattress and the pillows and the framework. Just as before there could be the blankets there had to be sheep with fleece on their backs, so before there could be this mattress there had to be horses, for it was stuffed with horsehair, the long hairs combed from their tails chiefly in Russia, South America, and Australia. But, you say, the hair in a horse's tail is long and straight, while the hair that one can pull out of mattresses is short and curly. That is true; but the curl has been put there artificially, for a number of processes have to be gone through between the combing of the tail and Prue's slumbers on the mattress, and curling the hair is one of the most important, or there would be no spring to it.

And just as sheep and horses had to live before there could be blankets or mattresses, so did geese have to cackle over commons and be killed for the market before Prue could lay her head on that soft pillow. The goose is a familiar enough bird; a much rarer bird contributed to keep Prue warm at nights by supplying her with the beautiful soft quilt that lay on the top of her bed—the eider duck. The eider duck is a bird that lives in very cold regions, such as Spitzbergen and Greenland and Iceland and the north of Norway. The down comes from her breast and is plucked by herself to cover her eggs and keeps them warm. Having marked down an eider-duck's nest, the down-hunter takes away all its contents, and this he does again and again at intervals of a few days until he guesses that the eider-duck's patience is almost exhausted. He then leaves the eggs and down undisturbed, for fear that she will lay no more. The business of collecting down has become so important that artificial nests are made to which the birds gladly come, and in which, in spite of the way they are treated, they bravely go on laying eggs. From each of these nests half a pound of down is collected each breeding season; but before it is ready to be put into quilts it has to be washed and cleaned to such an extent that the half-pound has dwindled to a quarter. It all does not sound very gentlemanly, does it? but there are worse things than that in store for us. Well-to-do little girls in London cannot be made comfortable without a good deal of suffering going on in other parts of the world.

Take the looking-glass, for example, over there on the dressing-table: what about the brightness at the back of it which makes it reflect, and reflect not only what is in front of it but, as you have probably discovered by looking sideways at it, that which is apparently wholly out of its range too. I must confess that this strange power of a mirror amazes me as much as its ordinary gift of reflecting what is straight in front of it amazes a dog. The reflecting power of a mirror is obtained by spreading mercury or quicksilver on the back; but before this can be done the mercury has to be obtained, and that process is one of the most dangerous to men.

Quicksilver is a most delightful plaything. The first school to which I was sent, a school for girls and boys, was kept by a little old Quaker lady with highly-magnifying, gold-rimmed spectacles, who, when we had been good, used to bring out a little bottle of quicksilver and pour great shining drops from it on the green baize table, and it would run about in all directions. No doubt she explained the origin and nature of mercury as it ran, but I have forgotten that. All that I remember and have always remembered is that the presence of the quicksilver proved that we had been good and that everyone was happy; and it remains in my mind as a sign of content. This little old lady with the gold-rimmed spectacles kept also a casket containing those yellow, round, gelatine lozenges which look like sovereigns, and which confectioners often use to mend broken windows with. One of them was given to any child who coughed. You should have heard what a lot of coughing there was!

There I stopped the first lesson; and, as it happened, there the experiment stopped permanently. For I had let loose the furies! For the rest of that evening and the whole of the next morning, before we got them into the sea, the children did nothing but ask questions as to the origin of this and that. We were in despair, and my unpopularity reached a point almost beyond endurance. Frank avoided his family as though it owed him money; Wynne was undisguisedly testy, and even Mrs. Frank confessed that children's intelligences can be overstimulated. "At any rate," she said, "at Rimini and in summer. You must wait till we get back and it is colder."