109 files changed, 4664 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/12223-h/12223-h.htm b/12223-h/12223-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0ca111b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/12223-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,4664 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Idler Magazine, Vol. 3. Feb 1893</title>
+
+<style type="text/css">
+
+body {margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+
+blockquote
+  	{text-align: justify;}
+
+h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6
+  	{text-align: center;}
+
+hr
+  	{text-align: center; width: 50%;}
+
+html>body hr
+  	{margin-right: 25%; margin-left: 25%; width: 50%;}
+
+hr.full
+  	{width: 100%;}
+
+html>body hr.full
+  	{margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 0%; width: 100%;}
+
+img
+  	{border: none;}
+
+.figure
+  	{margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%;
+  	text-align: center; font-size: 0.7em;}
+
+.poetry
+        {margin: auto;}
+
+.sidenote
+	{float:left; clear: left; margin-left:-2%; width:30%;
+        font-weight:bold; text-align:left;
+	margin-top: 1em; margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em;}
+
+a:link {color:blue; text-decoration:none}
+a:visited {color:blue; text-decoration:none}
+a:hover {color:red}
+
+</style>
+
+</head>
+
+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12223 ***</div>
+    
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/001-1.jpg"><img src=
+        "images/001-1.jpg" width="80%" alt="" /></a></p>
+
+        <h1>THE IDLER MAGAZINE.</h1>
+
+        <h2>AN ILLUSTRATED MONTHLY.</h2>
+
+        <h4>EDITED BY JEROME K. JEROME &amp; ROBERT BARR.</h4>
+
+        <h2>VOL. III.</h2>
+
+        <h3>FEBRUARY TO JULY, 1893.</h3>
+
+        <h2>XIII. FEBRUARY 1893.</h2>
+
+        <h4>LONDON: CHATTO &amp; WINDUS, 214, PICCADILLY. 1893.</h4>
+        <hr class="full" />
+
+        <h2>CONTENTS.</h2>
+
+        <ul>
+            <li><a href="#i13s1">Cheating The Gallows.</a> By I.
+            Zangwill.</li>
+
+            <li>
+                <a href="#i13s2">My First Novel.</a> By Miss M. E.
+                Braddon.
+
+                <ul>
+                    <li>The Trail Of The Serpent.</li>
+                </ul>
+            </li>
+
+            <li><a href="#i13s3">Novel Notes.</a> By Jerome K.
+            Jerome.</li>
+
+            <li><a href="#i13s4">The Skater.</a> By William Canton.</li>
+
+            <li><a href="#i13s5">My Servant Andreas.</a> By Archibald
+            Forbes.</li>
+
+            <li>
+                <a href="#i13s6">Told By The Colonel.</a> By W. L. Alden.
+
+                <ul>
+                    <li>X. A Matrimonial Romance.</li>
+                </ul>
+            </li>
+
+            <li>
+                <a href="#i13s7">"Lions In Their Dens."</a> By Raymond
+                Blathwayt.
+
+                <ul>
+                    <li>II.&mdash;George Grossmith And The Humour Of
+                    Him.</li>
+                </ul>
+            </li>
+
+            <li><a href="#i13s8">A Blind Beggarman.</a> By Frank
+            Mathew.</li>
+
+            <li><a href="#i13s9">Church And Stage. A Review of Henry
+            Irving.</a> By The Rev. Dr. Joseph Parker.</li>
+
+            <li><a href="#i13s10">That Beast Beauty.</a> By Kirby
+            Hare.</li>
+
+            <li>
+                <a href="#i13s11">People I Have Never Met.</a> By Scott
+                Rankin.
+
+                <ul>
+                    <li>Mrs. Humphry Ward.</li>
+                </ul>
+            </li>
+
+            <li>
+                <a href="#i13s12">The Idlers Club</a>
+
+                <ul>
+                    <li>Is Love a Practical Reality or a Pleasing
+                    Fiction?</li>
+                </ul>
+            </li>
+        </ul>
+
+        <h2><a id="i13s1" name="i13s1"></a>CHEATING THE GALLOWS.</h2>
+
+        <h3>BY I. ZANGWILL.</h3>
+
+        <h4>ILLUSTRATIONS BY GEO. HUTCHINSON.</h4>
+        <hr />
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/005-1.jpg"><img src=
+        "images/005-1.jpg" width="80%" alt="" /></a><br />
+        THE CORPSE WASHED UP BY THE RIVER.</p>
+        <hr />
+
+        <h3>CHAPTER I.</h3>
+
+        <h3>CURIOUS COUPLE.</h3>
+
+        <p>They say that a union of opposites makes the happiest marriage,
+        and perhaps it is on the same principle that men who chum are always
+        so oddly assorted. You shall find a man of letters sharing diggings
+        with an auctioneer, and a medical student pigging with a
+        stockbroker's clerk. Perhaps each thus escapes the temptation to talk
+        "shop" in his hours of leisure, while he supplements his own
+        experiences of life by his companion's.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width: 40%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/006-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/006-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            TOM PETERS.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:30%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/006-2.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/006-2.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            EVERARD G. ROXDAL.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>There could not be an odder couple than Tom Peters and Everard G.
+        Roxdal&mdash;the contrast began with their names, and ran through the
+        entire chapter. They had a bedroom and a sitting-room in common, but
+        it would not be easy to find what else. To his landlady, worthy Mrs.
+        Seacon, Tom Peters's profession was a little vague, but everybody
+        knew that Roxdal was the manager of the City and Suburban Bank, and
+        it puzzled her to think why a bank manager should live with such a
+        seedy-looking person, who smoked clay pipes and sipped whiskey and
+        water all the evening when he was at home. For Roxdal was as spruce
+        and erect as his fellow-lodger was round-shouldered and shabby; he
+        never smoked, and he confined himself to a small glass of claret at
+        dinner.</p>
+
+        <p>It is possible to live with a man and see very little of him.
+        Where each of the partners lives his own life in his own way, with
+        his own circle of friends and external amusements, days may go by
+        without the men having five minutes together. Perhaps this explains
+        why these partnerships jog along so much more peaceably than
+        marriages, where the chain is drawn so much tighter, and galls the
+        partners rather than links them. Diverse, however, as were the hours
+        and habits of the chums, they often breakfasted together, and they
+        agreed in one thing&mdash;they never stayed out at night. For the
+        rest Peters sought his diversions in the company of journalists, and
+        frequented debating rooms, where he propounded the most iconoclastic
+        views; while Roxdal had highly respectable houses open to him in the
+        suburbs, and was, in fact, engaged to be married to Clara Newell, the
+        charming daughter of a retired corn merchant, a widower with no other
+        child.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:50%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/007-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/007-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            ASKED TWENTY-FIVE PER CENT. MORE.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:50%; clear:right;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/008-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/008-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            FOR HIS SHAVING WATER.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>Clara naturally took up a good deal of Roxdal's time, and he often
+        dressed to go to the play with her, while Peters stayed at home in a
+        faded dressing-gown and loose slippers. Mrs. Seacon liked to see
+        gentlemen about the house in evening dress, and made comparisons not
+        favourable to Peters. And this in spite of the fact that he gave her
+        infinitely less trouble than the younger man. It was Peters who first
+        took the apartments, and it was characteristic of his easy-going
+        temperament that he was so openly and na&iuml;vely delighted with the
+        view of the Thames obtainable from the bedroom window, that Mrs.
+        Seacon was emboldened to ask twenty-five per cent. more than she had
+        intended. She soon returned to her normal terms, however, when his
+        friend Roxdal called the next day to inspect the rooms, and
+        overwhelmed her with a demonstration of their numerous shortcomings.
+        He pointed out that their being on the ground floor was not an
+        advantage, but a disadvantage, since they were nearer the noises of
+        the street&mdash;in fact, the house being a corner one, the noises of
+        two streets. Roxdal continued to exhibit the same finicking
+        temperament in the petty details of the <i>m&eacute;nage</i>. His
+        shirt fronts were never sufficiently starched, nor his boots
+        sufficiently polished. Tom Peters, having no regard for rigid linen,
+        was always good-tempered and satisfied, and never acquired the
+        respect of his landlady. He wore blue check shirts and loose ties
+        even on Sundays. It is true he did not go to church, but slept on
+        till Roxdal returned from morning service, and even then it was
+        difficult to get him out of bed, or to make him hurry up his toilette
+        operations. Often the mid-day meal would be smoking on the table
+        while Peters would smoke in the bed, and Roxdal, with his head thrust
+        through the folding doors that separated the bedroom from the
+        sitting-room, would be adjuring the sluggard to arise and shake off
+        his slumbers, and threatening to sit down without him, lest the
+        dinner be spoilt. In revenge, Tom was usually up first on week-days,
+        sometimes at such unearthly hours that Polly had not yet removed the
+        boots from outside the bedroom door, and would bawl down to the
+        kitchen for his shaving water. For Tom, lazy and indolent as he was,
+        shaved with the unfailing regularity of a man to whom shaving has
+        become an instinct. If he had not kept fairly regular hours, Mrs.
+        Seacon would have set him down as an actor, so clean shaven was he.
+        Roxdal did not shave. He wore a full beard, and, being a fine figure
+        of a man to boot, no uneasy investor could look upon him without
+        being reassured as to the stability of the bank he managed so
+        successfully. And thus the two men lived in an economical
+        comradeship, all the firmer, perhaps, for their mutual
+        incongruities.</p>
+        <hr style="clear:both;" />
+
+        <h3>CHAPTER II.</h3>
+
+        <h3>A WOMAN'S INSTINCT.</h3>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:80%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/009-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/009-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "TOM SHAMBLED FROM THE SITTING-ROOM."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>It was on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of October, ten days
+        after Roxdal had settled in his new rooms, that Clara Newell paid her
+        first visit to him there. She enjoyed a good deal of liberty, and did
+        not mind accepting his invitation to tea. The corn merchant, himself
+        indifferently educated, had an exaggerated sense of the value of
+        culture, and so Clara, who had artistic tastes without much actual
+        talent, had gone in for painting, and might be seen, in pretty
+        toilettes, copying pictures in the Museum. At one time it looked as
+        if she might be reduced to working seriously at her art, for Satan,
+        who finds mischief still for idle hands to do, had persuaded her
+        father to embark the fruits of years of toil in bubble companies.
+        However, things turned out not so bad as they might have been, a
+        little was saved from the wreck, and the appearance of a suitor, in
+        the person of Everard G. Roxdal, ensured her a future of competence,
+        if not of the luxury she had been entitled to expect. She had a good
+        deal of affection for Everard, who was unmistakably a clever man, as
+        well as a good-looking one. The prospect seemed fair and cloudless.
+        Nothing presaged the terrible storm that was about to break over
+        these two lives. Nothing had ever for a moment come to vex their
+        mutual contentment, till this Sunday afternoon. The October sky, blue
+        and sunny, with an Indian summer sultriness, seemed an exact image of
+        her life, with its aftermath of a happiness that had once seemed
+        blighted.</p>
+
+        <p>Everard had always been so attentive, so solicitous, that she was
+        as much surprised as chagrined to find that he had apparently
+        forgotten the appointment. Hearing her astonished interrogation of
+        Polly in the passage, Tom shambled from the sitting-room in his loose
+        slippers and his blue check shirt, with his eternal clay pipe in his
+        mouth, and informed her that Roxdal had gone out suddenly earlier in
+        the afternoon.</p>
+
+        <p>"G-g-one out," stammered poor Clara; all confused. "But he asked
+        me to come to tea."</p>
+
+        <p>"Oh, you're Miss Newell, I suppose," said Tom.</p>
+
+        <p>"Yes, I am Miss Newell."</p>
+
+        <p>"He has told me a great deal about you, but I wasn't able honestly
+        to congratulate him on his choice till now."</p>
+
+        <p>Clara blushed uneasily under the compliment, and under the ardour
+        of his admiring gaze. Instinctively she distrusted the man. The very
+        first tones of his deep bass voice gave her a peculiar shudder. And
+        then his impoliteness in smoking that vile clay was so
+        gratuitous.</p>
+
+        <p>"Oh, then you must be Mr. Peters," she said in return. "He has
+        often spoken to me of you."</p>
+
+        <p>"Ah!" said Tom, laughingly, "I suppose he's told you all my vices.
+        That accounts for your not being surprised at my Sunday attire."</p>
+
+        <p>She smiled a little, showing a row of pearly teeth. "Everard
+        ascribes to you all the virtues," she said.</p>
+
+        <p>"Now that's what I call a friend!" he cried, ecstatically. "But
+        won't you come in? He must be back in a moment. He surely would not
+        break an appointment with <i>you</i>." The admiration latent in the
+        accentuation of the last pronoun was almost offensive.</p>
+
+        <p>She shook her head. She had a just grievance against Everard, and
+        would punish him by going away indignantly.</p>
+
+        <p>"Do let <i>me</i> give you a cup of tea," Tom pleaded. "You must
+        be awfully thirsty this sultry weather. There! I will make a bargain
+        with you! If you will come in now, I promise to clear out the moment
+        Everard returns, and not spoil your
+        <i>t&ecirc;te-&agrave;-t&ecirc;te</i>." But Clara was obstinate; she
+        did not at all relish this man's society, and besides, she was not
+        going to throw away her grievance against Everard. "I know Everard
+        will slang me dreadfully when he comes in if I let you go," Tom
+        urged. "Tell me at least where he can find you."</p>
+
+        <p>"I am going to take the 'bus at Charing Cross, and I'm going
+        straight home," Clara announced determinedly. She put up her parasol
+        in a pet, and went up the street into the Strand. A cold shadow
+        seemed to have fallen over all things. But just as she was getting
+        into the 'bus, a hansom dashed down Trafalgar Square, and a
+        well-known voice hailed her. The hansom stopped, and Everard got out
+        and held out his hand.</p>
+
+        <p>"I'm so glad you're a bit late," he said. "I was called out
+        unexpectedly, and have been trying to rush back in time. You wouldn't
+        have found me if you had been punctual. But I thought," he added,
+        laughing, "I could rely on you as a woman."</p>
+
+        <p>"I <i>was</i> punctual," Clara said angrily. "I was not getting
+        out of this 'bus, as you seem to imagine, but into it, and was going
+        home."</p>
+
+        <p>"My darling!" he cried remorsefully. "A thousand apologies." The
+        regret on his handsome face soothed her. He took the rose he was
+        wearing in the button-hole of his fashionably-cut coat and gave it to
+        her.</p>
+
+        <p>"Why were you so cruel?" he murmured, as she nestled against him
+        in the hansom. "Think of my despair if I had come home to hear you
+        had come and gone. Why didn't you wait a moment?"</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:60%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/011-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/011-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "SHE NESTLED AGAINST HIM."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>A shudder traversed her frame. "Not with that man, Peters!" she
+        murmured.</p>
+
+        <p>"Not with that man, Peters!" he echoed sharply. "What is the
+        matter with Peters?"</p>
+
+        <p>"I don't know," she said. "I don't like him."</p>
+
+        <p>"Clara," he said, half sternly, half cajolingly, "I thought you
+        were above these feminine weaknesses; you are punctual, strive also
+        to be reasonable. Tom is my best friend. From boyhood we have been
+        always together. There is nothing Tom would not do for me, or I for
+        Tom. You must like him, Clara; you must, if only for my sake."</p>
+
+        <p>"I'll try," Clara promised, and then he kissed her in gratitude
+        and broad daylight.</p>
+
+        <p>"You'll be very nice to him at tea, won't you?" he said anxiously.
+        "I shouldn't like you two to be bad friends."</p>
+
+        <p>"I don't want to be bad friends," Clara protested; "only the
+        moment I saw him a strange repulsion and mistrust came over me."</p>
+
+        <p>"You are quite wrong about him&mdash;quite wrong," he assured her
+        earnestly. "When you know him better, you'll find him the best of
+        fellows. Oh, I know," he said suddenly, "I suppose he was very
+        untidy, and you women go so much by appearances!"</p>
+
+        <p>"Not at all," Clara retorted. "'Tis you men who go by
+        appearances."</p>
+
+        <p>"Yes, you do. That's why you care for me," he said, smiling.</p>
+
+        <p>She assured him it wasn't, and she didn't care for him so much as
+        he plumed himself, but he smiled on. His smile died away, however,
+        when he entered his rooms and found Tom nowhere.</p>
+
+        <p>"I daresay you've made him run about hunting for me," he
+        grumbled.</p>
+
+        <p>"Perhaps he knew I'd come back, and went away to leave us
+        together," she answered. "He said he would when you came."</p>
+
+        <p>"And yet you say you don't like him!"</p>
+
+        <p>She smiled reassuringly. Inwardly, however, she felt pleased at
+        the man's absence.</p>
+        <hr style="clear:both;" />
+
+        <h3>CHAPTER III.</h3>
+
+        <h3>POLLY RECEIVES A PROPOSAL.</h3>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:50%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/012-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/012-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "CARRYING ON WITH POLLY."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>If Clara Newell could have seen Tom Peters carrying on with Polly
+        in the passage, she might have felt justified in her prejudice
+        against him. It must be confessed, though, that Everard also carried
+        on with Polly. Alas! it is to be feared that men are much of a
+        muchness where women are concerned; shabby men and smart men, bank
+        managers and journalists, bachelors and semi-detached bachelors.
+        Perhaps it was a mistake after all to say the chums had nothing
+        patently in common. Everard, I am afraid, kissed Polly rather more
+        often than Clara, and although it was because he respected her less,
+        the reason would perhaps not have been sufficiently consoling to his
+        affianced wife. For Polly was pretty, especially on alternate Sunday
+        afternoons, and when at ten p.m. she returned from her outings, she
+        was generally met in the passage by one or other of the men. Polly
+        liked to receive the homage of real gentlemen, and set her white cap
+        at all indifferently. Thus, just before Clara knocked on that
+        memorable Sunday afternoon, Polly, being confined to the house by the
+        unwritten code regulating the lives of servants, was amusing herself
+        by flirting with Peters.</p>
+
+        <p>"You <i>are</i> fond of me a little bit," the graceless Tom
+        whispered, "aren't you?"</p>
+
+        <p>"You know I am, sir," Polly replied.</p>
+
+        <p>"You don't care for anyone else in the house?"</p>
+
+        <p>"Oh no, sir, and never let anyone kiss me but you. I wonder how it
+        is, sir?" Polly replied ingenuously.</p>
+
+        <p>"Give me another," Tom answered.</p>
+
+        <p>She gave him another, and tripped to the door to answer Clara's
+        knock.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:50%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/013-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/013-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            POLLY AND ROXDAL.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>And that very evening, when Clara was gone and Tom still out,
+        Polly turned without the faintest atom of scrupulosity, or even
+        jealousy, to the more fascinating Roxdal, and accepted his amorous
+        advances. If it would seem at first sight that Everard had less
+        excuse for such frivolity than his friend, perhaps the seriousness he
+        showed in this interview may throw a different light upon the complex
+        character of the man.</p>
+
+        <p>"You're quite sure you don't care for anyone but me?" he asked
+        earnestly.</p>
+
+        <p>"Of course not, sir!" Polly replied indignantly. "How could
+        I?"</p>
+
+        <p>"But you care for that soldier I saw you out with last
+        Sunday?"</p>
+
+        <p>"Oh no, sir, he's only my young man," she said apologetically.</p>
+
+        <p>"Would you give him up?" he hissed suddenly.</p>
+
+        <p>Polly's pretty face took a look of terror. "I couldn't, sir! He'd
+        kill me. He's such a jealous brute, you've no idea."</p>
+
+        <p>"Yes, but suppose I took you away from here?" he whispered
+        eagerly. "Somewhere where he couldn't find you&mdash;South America,
+        Africa, somewhere thousands of miles across the seas."</p>
+
+        <p>"Oh, sir, you frighten me!" whispered Polly, cowering before his
+        ardent eyes, which shone in the dimly-lit passage.</p>
+
+        <p>"Would you come with me?" he hissed. She did not answer; she shook
+        herself free and ran into the kitchen, trembling with a vague
+        fear.</p>
+        <hr style="clear:both;" />
+
+        <h3>CHAPTER IV.</h3>
+
+        <h3>THE CRASH.</h3>
+
+        <p>One morning, earlier than his earliest hour of demanding his
+        shaving water, Tom rang the bell violently and asked the alarmed
+        Polly what had become of Mr. Roxdal.</p>
+
+        <p>"How should I know, sir?" she gasped. "Ain't he been in, sir?"</p>
+
+        <p>"Apparently not," Tom answered anxiously. "He never remains out.
+        We have been here three weeks now, and I can't recall a single night
+        he hasn't been home before twelve. I can't make it out." All
+        enquiries proved futile. Mrs. Seacon reminded him of the thick fog
+        that had come on suddenly the night before.</p>
+
+        <p>"What fog?" asked Tom.</p>
+
+        <p>"Lord! didn't you notice it, sir?"</p>
+
+        <p>"No, I came in early, smoked, read, and went to bed about eleven.
+        I never thought of looking out of the window."</p>
+
+        <p>"It began about ten," said Mrs. Seacon, "and got thicker and
+        thicker. I couldn't see the lights of the river from my bedroom. The
+        poor gentleman has been and gone and walked into the water." She
+        began to whimper.</p>
+
+        <p>"Nonsense, nonsense," said Tom, though his expression belied his
+        words. "At the worst I should think he couldn't find his way home,
+        and couldn't get a cab, so put up for the night at some hotel. I
+        daresay it will be all right." He began to whistle as if in restored
+        cheerfulness. At eight o'clock there came a letter for Roxdal, marked
+        "immediate," but as he did not turn up for breakfast, Tom went round
+        personally to the City and Suburban Bank. He waited half-an-hour
+        there, but the manager did not make his appearance. Then he left the
+        letter with the cashier and went away with anxious countenance.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:50%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/015-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/015-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "SCOTLAND YARD OPENED THE LETTER."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>That afternoon it was all over London that the manager of the City
+        and Suburban had disappeared, and that many thousand pounds of gold
+        and notes had disappeared with him.</p>
+
+        <p>Scotland Yard opened the letter marked "immediate," and noted that
+        there had been a delay in its delivery, for the address had been
+        obscure, and an official alteration had been made. It was written in
+        a feminine hand and said: "On second thoughts I cannot accompany you.
+        Do not try to see me again. Forget me. I shall never forget you."</p>
+
+        <p>There was no signature.</p>
+
+        <p>Clara Newell, distracted, disclaimed all knowledge of this letter.
+        Polly deposed that the fugitive had proposed flight to her, and the
+        routes to Africa and South America were especially watched. Some
+        months passed without result. Tom Peters went about overwhelmed with
+        grief and astonishment. The police took possession of all the missing
+        man's effects. Gradually the hue and cry dwindled, died.</p>
+        <hr style="clear:both;" />
+
+        <h3>CHAPTER V.</h3>
+
+        <h3>FAITH AND UNFAITH.</h3>
+
+        <p>"At last we meet!" cried Tom Peters, while his face lit up in joy.
+        "How <i>are</i> you, dear Miss Newell?" Clara greeted him coldly. Her
+        face had an abiding pallor now. Her lover's flight and shame had
+        prostrated her for weeks. Her soul was the arena of contending
+        instincts. Alone of all the world she still believed in Everard's
+        innocence, felt that there was something more than met the eye,
+        divined some devilish mystery behind it all. And yet that damning
+        letter from the anonymous lady shook her sadly. Then, too, there was
+        the deposition of Polly. When she heard Peters's voice accosting her
+        all her old repugnance resurged. It flashed upon her that this
+        man&mdash;Roxdal's boon companion&mdash;must know far more than he
+        had told to the police. She remembered how Everard had spoken of him,
+        with what affection and confidence! Was it likely he was utterly
+        ignorant of Everard's movements? Mastering her repugnance, she held
+        out her hand. It might be well to keep in touch with him; he was
+        possibly the clue to the mystery. She noticed he was dressed a shade
+        more trimly, and was smoking a meerschaum. He walked along at her
+        side, making no offer to put his pipe out.</p>
+
+        <p>"You have not heard from Everard?" he asked. She flushed. "Do you
+        think I'm an accessory after the fact?" she cried.</p>
+
+        <p>"No, no," he said soothingly. "Pardon me, I was thinking he might
+        have written&mdash;giving no exact address, of course. Men do
+        sometimes dare to write thus to women. But, of course, he knows you
+        too well&mdash;you would have put the police on his track."</p>
+
+        <p>"Certainly," she exclaimed, indignantly. "Even if he is innocent
+        he must face the charge."</p>
+
+        <p>"Do you still entertain the possibility of his innocence?"</p>
+
+        <p>"I do," she said boldly, and looked him full in the face. His
+        eyelids drooped with a quiver. "Don't you?"</p>
+
+        <p>"I have hoped against hope," he replied, in a voice faltering with
+        emotion. "Poor old Everard! But I am afraid there is no room for
+        doubt. Oh, this wicked curse of money&mdash;tempting the noblest and
+        the best of us."</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/016-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/016-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "SHE DID NOT REPULSE HIM."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>The weeks rolled on. Gradually she found herself seeing more and
+        more of Tom Peters, and gradually, strange to say, he grew less
+        repulsive. From the talks they had together, she began to see that
+        there was really no reason to put faith in Everard; his criminality,
+        his faithlessness, were too flagrant. Gradually she grew ashamed of
+        her early mistrust of Peters; remorse bred esteem, and esteem
+        ultimately ripened into feelings so warm, that when Tom gave freer
+        vent to the love that had been visible to Clara from the first, she
+        did not repulse him.</p>
+
+        <p>It is only in books that love lives for ever. Clara, so her father
+        thought, showed herself a sensible girl in plucking out an unworthy
+        affection and casting it from her heart. He invited the new lover to
+        his house, and took to him at once. Roxdal's somewhat supercilious
+        manner had always jarred upon the unsophisticated corn merchant. With
+        Tom the old man got on much better. While evidently quite as well
+        informed and cultured as his whilom friend, Tom knew how to impart
+        his superior knowledge with the accent on the knowledge rather than
+        on the superiority, while he had the air of gaining much information
+        in return. Those who are most conscious of defects of early education
+        are most resentful of other people sharing their consciousness
+        Moreover, Tom's <i>bonhomie</i> was far more to the old fellow's
+        liking than the studied politeness of his predecessor, so that on the
+        whole Tom made more of a conquest of the father than of the daughter.
+        Nevertheless, Clara was by no means unresponsive to Tom's affection,
+        and when, after one of his visits to the house, the old man kissed
+        her fondly and spoke of the happy turn things had taken, and how, for
+        the second time in their lives, things had mended when they seemed at
+        their blackest, her heart swelled with a gush of gratitude and joy
+        and tenderness, and she fell sobbing into her father's arms.</p>
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/017-1.jpg"><img src=
+        "images/017-1.jpg" width="80%" alt="" /></a><br />
+        "WITH TOM THE OLD MAN GOT ON MUCH BETTER."</p>
+
+        <p>Tom calculated that he made a clear five hundred a year by
+        occasional journalism, besides possessing some profitable investments
+        which he had inherited from his mother, so that there was no reason
+        for delaying the marriage. It was fixed for May-day, and the
+        honeymoon was to be spent in Italy.</p>
+        <hr />
+
+        <h3>CHAPTER VI</h3>
+
+        <h3>THE DREAM AND THE AWAKENING</h3>
+
+        <p>But Clara was not destined to happiness. From the moment she had
+        promised herself to her first love's friend old memories began to
+        rise up and reproach her. Strange thoughts stirred in the depths of
+        her soul, and in the silent watches of the night she seemed to hear
+        Everard's accents, charged with grief and upbraiding. Her uneasiness
+        increased as her wedding-day drew near. One night, after a pleasant
+        afternoon spent in being rowed by Tom among the upper reaches of the
+        Thames, she retired to rest full of vague forebodings. And she dreamt
+        a terrible dream. The dripping form of Everard stood by her bedside,
+        staring at her with ghastly eyes. Had he been drowned on the passage
+        to his land of exile? Frozen with horror, she put the question.</p>
+
+        <p>"I have never left England!" the vision answered.</p>
+
+        <p>Her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth.</p>
+
+        <p>"Never left England?" she repeated, in tones which did not seem to
+        be hers.</p>
+
+        <p>The wraith's stony eyes stared on, but there was silence.</p>
+
+        <p>"Where have you been then?" she asked in her dream.</p>
+
+        <p>"Very near you," came the answer.</p>
+
+        <p>"There has been foul play then!" she shrieked.</p>
+
+        <p>The phantom shook its head in doleful assent.</p>
+
+        <p>"I knew it!" she shrieked. "Tom Peters&mdash;Tom Peters has done
+        away with you. Is it not he? Speak!"</p>
+
+        <p>"Yes, it is he&mdash;Tom Peters&mdash;whom I loved more than all
+        the world."</p>
+
+        <p>Even in the terrible oppression of the dream she could not resist
+        saying, woman-like:</p>
+
+        <p>"Did I not warn you against him?"</p>
+
+        <p>The phantom stared on silently and made no reply.</p>
+
+        <p>"But what was his motive?" she asked at length.</p>
+
+        <p>"Love of gold&mdash;and you. And you are giving yourself to him,"
+        it said sternly.</p>
+
+        <p>"No, no, Everard! I will not! I will not! I swear it! Forgive
+        me!"</p>
+
+        <p>The spirit shook its head sceptically.</p>
+
+        <p>"You love him. Women are false&mdash;as false as men."</p>
+
+        <p>She strove to protest again, but her tongue refused its
+        office.</p>
+
+        <p>"If you marry him, I shall always be with you! Beware!"</p>
+
+        <p>The dripping figure vanished as suddenly as it came, and Clara
+        awoke in a cold perspiration. Oh, it was horrible! The man she had
+        learnt to love, the murderer of the man she had learnt to forget! How
+        her original prejudice had been justified! Distracted, shaken to her
+        depths, she would not take counsel even of her father, but informed
+        the police of her suspicions. A raid was made on Tom's rooms, and lo!
+        the stolen notes were discovered in a huge bundle. It was found that
+        he had several banking accounts, with a large, recently-paid amount
+        in each bank. Tom was arrested. Attention was now concentrated on the
+        corpses washed up by the river. It was not long before the body of
+        Roxdal came to shore, the face distorted almost beyond recognition by
+        long immersion, but the clothes patently his, and a pocket-book in
+        the breast-pocket removing the last doubt. Mrs. Seacon and Polly and
+        Clara Newell all identified the body. Both juries returned a verdict
+        of murder against Tom Peters, the recital of Clara's dream producing
+        a unique impression in the court and throughout the country. The
+        theory of the prosecution was that Roxdal had brought home the money,
+        whether to fly alone or to divide it, or whether even for some
+        innocent purpose, as Clara believed, was immaterial. That Peters
+        determined to have it all, that he had gone out for a walk with the
+        deceased, and, taking advantage of the fog, had pushed him into the
+        river, and that he was further impelled to the crime by love for
+        Clara Newell, as was evident from his subsequent relations with her.
+        The judge put on the black cap. Tom Peters was duly hung by the neck
+        till he was dead.</p>
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/019-1.jpg"><img src=
+        "images/019-1.jpg" width="80%" alt="" /></a><br />
+        "IDENTIFIED THE BODY."</p>
+        <hr />
+
+        <h3>CHAPTER VII.</h3>
+
+        <h3>BRIEF R&Eacute;SUM&Eacute; OF THE CULPRIT'S CONFESSION.</h3>
+
+        <p>When you all read this I shall be dead and laughing at you. I have
+        been hung for my own murder. I am Everard G. Roxdal. I am also Tom
+        Peters. We two were one. When I was a young man my moustache and
+        beard wouldn't come. I bought false ones to improve my appearance.
+        One day, after I had become manager of the City and Suburban Bank, I
+        took off my beard and moustache at home, and then the thought crossed
+        my mind that nobody would know me without them. I was another man.
+        Instantly it flashed upon me that if I ran away from the Bank, that
+        other man could be left in London, while the police were scouring the
+        world for a non-existent fugitive. But this was only the crude germ
+        of the idea. Slowly I matured my plan. The man who was going to be
+        left in London must be known to a circle of acquaintance beforehand.
+        It would be easy enough to masquerade in the evenings in my beardless
+        condition, with other disguises of dress and voice. But this was not
+        brilliant enough. I conceived the idea of living with him. It was Box
+        and Cox reversed. We shared rooms at Mrs. Seacon's. It was a great
+        strain, but it was only for a few weeks. I had trick clothes in my
+        bedroom like those of quick-change artistes; in a moment I could pass
+        from Roxdal to Peters and from Peters to Roxdal. Polly had to clean
+        two pairs of boots a morning, cook two dinners, &amp;c., &amp;c. She
+        and Mrs. Seacon saw one or the other of us every moment; it never
+        dawned upon them they never saw us <i>both together</i>. At meals I
+        would not be interrupted, ate off two plates, and conversed with my
+        friend in loud tones. At other times we dined at different hours. On
+        Sundays he was supposed to be asleep when I was in church. There is
+        no landlady in the world to whom the idea would have occurred that
+        one man was troubling himself to be two (and to pay for two,
+        including washing). I worked up the idea of Roxdal's flight, asked
+        Polly to go with me, manufactured that feminine letter that arrived
+        on the morning of my disappearance. As Tom Peters I mixed with a
+        journalistic set. I had another room where I kept the gold and notes
+        till I mistakenly thought the thing had blown over. Unfortunately,
+        returning from here on the night of my disappearance, with Roxdal's
+        clothes in a bundle I intended to drop into the river, it was stolen
+        from me in the fog, and the man into whose possession it ultimately
+        came appears to have committed suicide. What, perhaps, ruined me was
+        my desire to keep Clara's love, and to transfer it to the survivor.
+        Everard told her I was the best of fellows. Once married to her, I
+        would not have had much fear. Even if she had discovered the trick, a
+        wife cannot give evidence against her husband, and often does not
+        want to. I made none of the usual slips, but no man can guard against
+        a girl's nightmare after a day up the river and a supper at the Star
+        and Garter. I might have told the judge he was an ass, but then I
+        should have had penal servitude for bank robbery, and that is worse
+        than death. The only thing that puzzles me, though, is whether the
+        law has committed murder or I suicide.</p>
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/021-1.jpg"><img src=
+        "images/021-1.jpg" width="50%" alt="" /></a></p>
+
+        <h2><a id="i13s2" name="i13s2"></a>MY FIRST NOVEL.</h2>
+
+        <h3>THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT.</h3>
+
+        <h3>BY MISS M. E. BRADDON.</h3>
+
+        <h4>ILLUSTRATIONS BY MISS F. L. FULLER.</h4>
+
+        <p>My first novel! Far back in the distinctness of childish memories
+        I see a little girl who has lately learnt to write, who has lately
+        been given a beautiful brand new mahogany desk, with a red velvet
+        slope, and a glass ink bottle, such a desk as might now be bought for
+        three and sixpence, but which in the forties cost at least
+        half-a-guinea. Very proud is the little girl, with the Kenwigs
+        pigtails, and the Kenwigs frills, of that mahogany desk, and its
+        infinite capacities for literary labour, above all, gem of gems, its
+        stick of variegated sealing-wax, brown, speckled with gold, and its
+        little glass seal with an intaglio representing two
+        doves&mdash;Pliny's doves perhaps, famous in mosaic, only the little
+        girl had never heard of Pliny, or his Laurentine Villa.</p>
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/022-1.jpg"><img src=
+        "images/022-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+        LICHFIELD HOUSE, RICHMOND.</p>
+
+        <p>Armed with that desk and its supply of stationery, Mary Elizabeth
+        Braddon&mdash;very fond of writing her name at full-length, and her
+        address also at full-length, though the word "Middlesex" offered
+        difficulties&mdash;began that pilgrimage on the broad high road of
+        fiction, which was destined to be a longish one. So much for the
+        little girl of eight years old, in the third person, and now to
+        become strictly autobiographical.</p>
+
+        <p>My first story was based on those fairy tales which first opened
+        to me the world of imaginative literature. My first attempt in
+        fiction, and in round-hand, on carefully pencilled double lines, was
+        a story of two sisters, a good sister and a wicked, and I fear
+        adhered more faithfully to the lines of the archetypal story than the
+        writer's pen kept to the double fence which should have ensured
+        neatness.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/023-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/023-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            THE HALL.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:40%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/024-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/024-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            THE STAIRCASE.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>The interval between the ages of eight and twelve was a prolific
+        period, fertile in unfinished MSS., among which I can now trace a
+        historical novel on the Siege of Calais&mdash;an Eastern story,
+        suggested by a passionate love of Miss Pardoe's Turkish tales, and
+        Byron's "Bride of Abydos," which my mother, a devoted Byron
+        worshipper, allowed me to read aloud to her&mdash;and doubtless
+        murder in the reading&mdash;a story of the Hartz Mountains, with
+        audacious flights in German diablerie; and lastly, very seriously
+        undertaken, and very perseveringly worked upon, a domestic story, the
+        outline of which was suggested by the same dear and sympathetic
+        mother.</p>
+
+        <p>Now it is a curious fact, which may or may not be common to other
+        story-spinners, that I have never been able to take kindly to a
+        plot&mdash;or the suggestion of a plot&mdash;offered to me by anybody
+        else. The moment a friend tells me that he or she is desirous of
+        imparting a series of facts&mdash;strictly true&mdash;as if truth in
+        fiction mattered one jot!&mdash;which in his or her opinion would
+        make the ground plan of an admirable, startling, and altogether
+        original three-volume novel, I know in advance that my imagination
+        will never grapple with those startling circumstances&mdash;that my
+        thoughts will begin to wander before my friend has got half through
+        the remarkable chain of events, and that if the obliging purveyor of
+        romantic incidents were to examine me at the end of the story, I
+        should be spun ignominiously. For the most part, such subjects as
+        have been proposed to me by friends have been hopelessly unfit for
+        the circulating library; or, where not immoral, have been utterly
+        dull; but it is, I believe, a fixed idea in the novel-reader's mind
+        that any combination of events out of the beaten way of life will
+        make an admirable subject for the novelist's art.</p>
+
+        <p>My dear mother, taking into consideration my tender years, and
+        perhaps influenced in somewise by her own love of picking up odd bits
+        of Sheraton or Chippendale furniture in the storehouses of the less
+        ambitious second-hand dealers of those simpler days, offered me the
+        following <i>scenario</i> for a domestic story. It was an incident
+        which, I doubt not, she had often read at the tail of a newspaper
+        column, and which certainly savours of the gigantic gooseberry, the
+        sea-serpent, and the agricultural labourer who unexpectedly inherits
+        half-a-million. It was eminently a Simple Story, and far more worthy
+        of that title than Mrs. Inchbald's long and involved romance.</p>
+
+        <p>An honest couple, in humble circumstances, possess among their
+        small household gear a good old easy chair, which has been the pride
+        of a former generation, and is the choicest of their household gods.
+        A comfortable cushioned chair, snug and restful, albeit the chintz
+        covering, though clean and tidy, as virtuous people's furniture
+        always is in fiction, is worn thin by long service, while the dear
+        chair itself is no longer the chair it once was as to legs and
+        framework.</p>
+
+        <p>Evil days come upon the praiseworthy couple and their dependent
+        brood, among whom I faintly remember the love interest of the story
+        to have lain; and that direful day arrives when the average landlord
+        of juvenile fiction, whose heart is of adamant and brain of brass,
+        distrains for the rent. The rude broker swoops upon the humble
+        dovecot; a cart or hand-barrow waits on the carefully hearth-stoned
+        door-step for the household gods; the family gather round the
+        cherished chair, on which the rude broker has already laid his grimy
+        fingers; they hang over the back and fondle the padded arms; and the
+        old grandmother, with clasped hands, entreats that, if able to raise
+        the money in a few days, they may be allowed to buy back that loved
+        heirloom.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/025-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/025-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            THE DINING ROOM.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>The broker laughs the plea to scorn; they might have their chair,
+        and cheap enough, he had no doubt. The cover was darned and
+        patched&mdash;as only the virtuous poor of fiction do darn and do
+        patch&mdash;and he made no doubt the stuffing was nothing better than
+        brown wool; and with that coarse taunt the coarser broker dug his
+        clasp-knife into the cushion against which grandfatherly backs had
+        leaned in happier days, and lo! an avalanche of banknotes fell out of
+        the much-maligned horse-hair, and the family was lifted from penury
+        to wealth. Nothing more simple&mdash;or more natural. A prudent but
+        eccentric ancestor had chosen this mode of putting by his savings,
+        assured that, whenever discovered, the money would be useful
+        to&mdash;somebody.</p>
+
+        <p>So ran the <i>scenario</i>: but I fancy my juvenile pen hardly
+        held on to the climax. My brief experience of boarding school
+        occurred at this time, and I well remember writing "The Old Arm
+        Chair" in a penny account book, in the schoolroom of Cresswell Lodge,
+        and that I was both surprised and offended at the laughter of the
+        kindly music-teacher who, coming into the room to summon a pupil, and
+        seeing me gravely occupied, enquired what I was doing, and was
+        intensely amused at my stolid method of composition, plodding on
+        undisturbed by the voices and occupations of the older girls around
+        me. "The Old Arm Chair" was certainly my first serious, painstaking
+        effort in fiction; but as it was abandoned unfinished before my
+        eleventh birthday, and as no line thereof ever achieved the
+        distinction of type, it can hardly rank as my first novel.</p>
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/026-1.jpg"><img src=
+        "images/026-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+        THE DRAWING-ROOM.</p>
+
+        <p>There came a very few years later the sentimental period, in which
+        my unfinished novels assumed a more ambitious form, and were modelled
+        chiefly upon Jane Eyre, with occasional tentative imitations of
+        Thackeray. Stories of gentle hearts that loved in vain, always ending
+        in renunciation. One romance there was, I well remember, begun with
+        resolute purpose, after the first reading of Esmond, and in the
+        endeavour to give life and local colour to a story of the Restoration
+        period, a brilliantly wicked interval in the social history of
+        England, which, after the lapse of thirty years, I am still as bent
+        upon taking for the background of a love story as I was when I began
+        "Master Anthony's Record" in Esmondese, and made my girlish
+        acquaintance with the Reading-room of the British Museum, where I
+        went in quest of local colour, and where much kindness was shown to
+        my youth and inexperience of the book world. Poring over a folio
+        edition of the State Trials at my uncle's quiet rectory in sleepy
+        Sandwich, I had discovered the passionate romantic story of Lord
+        Grey's elopement with his sister-in-law, next in sequence to the
+        trial of Lawrence Braddon and Hugh Speke for conspiracy. At the risk
+        of seeming disloyal to my own race, I must add that it seemed to me a
+        very tinpot order of plot to which these two learned gentlemen bent
+        their legal minds, and which cost the Braddon family a heavy fine in
+        land near Camelford&mdash;confiscation which I have heard my father
+        complain of as especially unfair&mdash;Lawrence being a younger son.
+        The romantic story of Lord Grey was to be the subject of "Master
+        Anthony's Record," but Master Anthony's sentimental autobiography
+        went the way of all my earlier efforts. It was but a year or so after
+        the collapse of Master Anthony, that a blindly-enterprising printer
+        of Beverley, who had seen my poor little verses in the <i>Beverley
+        Recorder</i>, made me the spirited offer of ten pounds for a serial
+        story, to be set up and printed at Beverley, and published on
+        commission by a London firm in Warwick Lane. I cannot picture to
+        myself, in my after-knowledge of the bookselling trade, any
+        enterprise more futile in its inception or more feeble in its
+        execution; but to my youthful ambition the actual commission to write
+        a novel, with an advance payment of fifty shillings to show good
+        faith on the part of my Yorkshire speculator, seemed like the opening
+        of that pen-and-ink paradise which I had sighed for ever since I
+        could hold a pen. I had, previously to this date, found a
+        M&aelig;cenas in Beverley, in the person of a learned gentleman who
+        volunteered to foster my love of the Muses by buying the copyright of
+        a volume of poems and publishing the same at his own
+        expense&mdash;which he did, poor man, without stint, and by which
+        noble patronage of Poet's Corner verse, he must have lost money. He
+        had, however, the privilege of dictating the subject of the principal
+        poem, which was to sing&mdash;however feebly&mdash;Garibaldi's
+        Sicilian campaign.</p>
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/027-1.jpg"><img src=
+        "images/027-1.jpg" width="80%" alt="" /></a><br />
+        THE EVENING ROOM.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/028-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/028-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            THE SMOKING-ROOM.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>The Beverley printer suggested that my Warwick Lane serial should
+        combine, as far as my powers allowed, the human interest and genial
+        humour of Dickens with the plot-weaving of G. W. R. Reynolds; and,
+        furnished with these broad instructions, I filled my ink bottle,
+        spread out my foolscap, and, on a hopelessly wet afternoon, began my
+        first novel&mdash;now known as "The Trail of the Serpent"&mdash;but
+        published in Warwick Lane, and later in the stirring High Street of
+        Beverley, as "Three Times Dead." In "Three Times Dead" I gave loose
+        to all my leanings to the violent in melodrama. Death stalked in
+        ghastliest form across my pages; and villainy reigned triumphant till
+        the Nemesis of the last chapter. I wrote with all the freedom of one
+        who feared not the face of a critic; and, indeed, thanks to the
+        obscurity of its original production, and its re-issue as the
+        ordinary two-shilling railway novel, this first novel of mine has
+        almost entirely escaped the critical lash, and has pursued its way as
+        a chartered libertine. People buy it and read it, and its faults and
+        follies are forgiven as the exuberances of a pen unchastened by
+        experience; but faster and more facile at that initial stage than it
+        ever became after long practice.</p>
+
+        <p>I dashed headlong at my work, conjured up my images of horror or
+        of mirth, and boldly built the framework of my story, and set my
+        puppets moving. To me, at least, they were living creatures, who
+        seemed to follow impulses of their own, to be impelled by their own
+        passions, to love and hate, and plot and scheme of their own accord.
+        There was unalloyed pleasure in the composition of that first story,
+        and the knowledge that it was to be actually printed and published,
+        and not to be declined with thanks by adamantine magazine editors,
+        like a certain short story which I had lately written, and which
+        contained the germ of "Lady Audley's Secret." Indeed, at this period
+        of my life, the postman's knock had become associated in my mind with
+        the sharp sound of a rejected MS. dropping through the open
+        letter-box on to the floor of the hall, while my heart seemed to drop
+        in sympathy with that book-post packet.</p>
+
+        <p class="figure" style="clear:both;"><a href=
+        "images/029-1.jpg"><img src="images/029-1.jpg" width="100%" alt=
+        "" /></a><br />
+        THE LIBRARY.</p>
+
+        <p>Short of never being printed at all, my Beverley-born novel could
+        have hardly entered upon the world of books in a more profound
+        obscurity. That one living creature ever bought a number of "Three
+        Times Dead" I greatly doubt. I can recall the thrill of emotion with
+        which I tore open the envelope that contained my complimentary copy
+        of the first number, folded across, and in aspect inferior to a
+        gratis pamphlet about a patent medicine. The miserable little wood
+        block which illustrated that first number would have disgraced a
+        baker's whitey-brown bag, would have been unworthy to illustrate a
+        penny bun. My spirits were certainly dashed at the technical
+        shortcomings of that first serial, and I was hardly surprised when I
+        was informed a few weeks later, that although my admirers at Beverley
+        were deeply interested in the story, it was not a financial success,
+        and that it would be only obliging on my part, and in accordance with
+        my known kindness of heart, if I were to restrict the development of
+        the romance to half its intended length, and to accept five pounds in
+        lieu of ten as my reward. Having no desire that the rash Beverley
+        printer should squander his own or his children's fortune in the
+        obscurity of Warwick Lane, I immediately acceded to his request,
+        shortened sail, and went on with my story, perhaps with a shade less
+        enthusiasm, having seen the shabby figure it was to make in the book
+        world. I may add that the Beverley publisher's payments began and
+        ended with his noble advance of fifty shillings. The balance was
+        never paid; and it was rather hard lines that, on his becoming
+        bankrupt in his poor little way a few years later, a judge in the
+        Bankruptcy Court remarked that, as Miss Braddon was now making a good
+        deal of money by her pen, she ought to "come to the relief" of her
+        first publisher.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/030-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/030-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            MISS BRADDON'S FAVOURITE MARE.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>And now my volume of verses being well under weigh, I went with my
+        mother to farm-house lodgings in the neighbourhood of that very
+        Beverley, where I spent, perhaps, the happiest half-year of my
+        life&mdash;half a year of tranquil, studious days, far from the
+        madding crowd, with the mother whose society was always all
+        sufficient for me&mdash;half a year among level pastures, with
+        unlimited books from the library in Hull, an old farm-horse to ride
+        about the green lanes, the breath of summer, with all its sweet
+        odours of flower and herb, around and about us: half a year of
+        unalloyed bliss, had it not been for one dark shadow, the heroic
+        figure of Garibaldi, the sailor soldier, looming large upon the
+        foreground of my literary labours, as the hero of a lengthy narrative
+        poem in the Spenserian metre.</p>
+
+        <p>My chief business at Beverley was to complete the volume of verse
+        commissioned by my Yorkshire M&aelig;cenas, at that time a very rich
+        man, who paid me a much better price for my literary work than his
+        townsman, the enterprising printer, and who had the first claim on my
+        thought and time.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:60%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/031-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/031-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            THE ORANGERY.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>With the business-like punctuality of a salaried clerk, I went
+        every morning to my file of the <i>Times</i>, and pored and puzzled
+        over Neapolitan revolution and Sicilian campaign, and I can only say
+        that if Emile Zola has suffered as much over Sedan as I suffered in
+        the freshness of my youth, when flowery meadows and the old chestnut
+        mare invited to summer idlesse, over the fighting in Sicily, his
+        dogged perseverance in uncongenial labour should place him among the
+        Immortal Forty. How I hated the great Joseph G. and the Spenserian
+        metre, with its exacting demands upon the rhyming faculty. How I
+        hated my own ignorance of modern Italian history, and my own eyes for
+        never having looked upon Italian landscape, whereby historical
+        allusion and local colour were both wanting to that dry-as-dust
+        record of heroic endeavour. I had only the <i>Times</i>
+        correspondent; where he was picturesque I could be
+        picturesque&mdash;allowing always for the Spenserian
+        straining&mdash;where he was rich in local colour I did my utmost to
+        reproduce his colouring, stretched always on the Spenserian rack, and
+        lengthened out by the bitter necessity of finding triple rhymes. Next
+        to Guiseppe Garibaldi I hated Edmund Spenser, and it may be from a
+        vengeful remembrance of those early struggles with a difficult form
+        of versification, that, although throughout my literary life I have
+        been a lover of England's earlier poet, and have delighted in the
+        quaintness and <i>na&iuml;vet&eacute;</i> of Chaucer, I have
+        refrained from reading more than a casual stanza or two of the
+        "Fa&euml;ry Queen." When I lived at Beverley, Spenser was to me but a
+        name, and Byron's "Childe Harold" was my only model for that exacting
+        verse. I should add that the Beverley M&aelig;cenas, when
+        commissioning this volume of verse, was less superb in his ideas than
+        the literary patron of the past. He looked at the matter from a
+        purely commercial standpoint, and believed that a volume of verse,
+        such as I could produce, would pay&mdash;a delusion on his part which
+        I honestly strove to combat before accepting his handsome offer of
+        remuneration for my time and labour. It was with this idea in his
+        mind that he chose and insisted upon the Sicilian Campaign as a
+        subject for my muse, and thus started me heavily handicapped on the
+        racecourse of Parnassus.</p>
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/032-1.jpg"><img src=
+        "images/032-1.jpg" width="80%" alt="" /></a><br />
+        MISS BRADDON'S COTTAGE AT LYNDHURST.</p>
+
+        <p>The weekly number of "Three Times Dead" was "thrown off" in brief
+        intervals of rest from my <i>magnum opus</i>, and it was an infinite
+        relief to turn from Garibaldi and his brothers in arms to the angels
+        and the monsters which my own brain had engendered, and which to me
+        seemed more alive than the good great man whose arms I so laboriously
+        sang. My rustic pipe far better loved to sing of melodramatic
+        poisoners and ubiquitous detectives; of fine houses in the West of
+        London, and dark dens in the East. So the weekly chapter of my first
+        novel ran merrily off my pen while the printer's boy waited in the
+        farm-house kitchen.</p>
+
+        <p>Happy, happy days, so near to memory, and yet so far. In that
+        peaceful summer I finished my first novel, knocked Garibaldi on the
+        head with a closing rhapsody, saw the York spring and summer races in
+        hopelessly wet weather, learnt to love the Yorkshire people, and left
+        Yorkshire almost broken-heartedly on a dull gray October morning, to
+        travel Londonwards through a landscape that was mostly under
+        water.</p>
+
+        <p>And, behold, since that October morning I have written fifty-three
+        novels; I have lost dear old friends and found new friends, who are
+        also dear, but I have never looked on a Yorkshire landscape since I
+        turned my reluctant eyes from those level meadows and green lanes
+        where the old chestnut mare used to carry me ploddingly to and fro
+        between tall, tangled hedges of eglantine and honeysuckle.</p>
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/033-1.jpg"><img src=
+        "images/033-1.jpg" width="40%" alt="" /></a><br />
+        MISS BRADDON'S INKSTAND.</p>
+
+        <h2><a id="i13s3" name="i13s3"></a>NOVEL NOTES.</h2>
+
+        <h3>BY JEROME K. JEROME.</h3>
+
+        <h4>ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. G&Uuml;LICH AND J. GREIG,</h4>
+
+        <h3>PART X.</h3>
+        <hr />
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:80%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/034-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/034-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "DISCUSSION AT OUR LAST MEETING."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>The final question discussed at our last meeting had been: What
+        shall our hero be? MacShaugnassy had suggested an author, with a
+        critic for the villain. Brown's fancy was an artist. My idea was a
+        stockbroker, with an undercurrent of romance in his nature. Said
+        Jephson, who has a practical mind, approaching at times the
+        commercial: "The question is not what we like, but what the female
+        novel-reader likes."</p>
+
+        <p>"That is so," agreed MacShaugnassy. "I propose that we collect
+        feminine opinion upon this point. I will write to my aunt, and get
+        from her the old lady's view. You," he said, turning to me, "can put
+        the case to your wife, and get the young lady's ideal. Let Brown
+        write to his sister at Newnham, and find out whom the intellectual
+        maiden favours, while Jephson can learn from Miss Medbury what is
+        most attractive to the common-sensed girl."</p>
+
+        <p>This plan we had adopted, and the result was now under
+        consideration. MacShaugnassy opened the proceedings by reading his
+        aunt's letter. Wrote the old lady:</p>
+
+        <blockquote><p>
+            "I think, if I were you, my dear boy, I should choose a soldier.
+            You know your poor grandfather, who ran away to America with that
+            <i>wicked</i> Mrs. Featherly, the banker's wife, was a soldier,
+            and so was your poor cousin Robert, who lost eight thousand
+            pounds at Monte Carlo. I have always felt singularly drawn
+            towards soldiers, even as a girl; though your poor dear uncle
+            could not bear them. You will find many allusions to soldiers and
+            men of war in the Old Testament (see Jer. 48,14). Of course one
+            does not like to think of their fighting and killing each other,
+            but then they do not seem to do much of that sort of thing
+            nowadays."</p>
+        </blockquote>
+
+        <p>"So much for the old lady," said MacShaugnassy, as he folded up
+        the letter and returned it to his pocket. "What says culture?"</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:25%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/035-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/035-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            BROWN READ AS FOLLOWS.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>Brown produced from his cigar-case a letter addressed in a bold
+        round hand, and read as follows:</p>
+
+        <blockquote><p>
+            "What a curious coincidence! A few of us were discussing this
+            very subject last night in Millicent Hightopper's rooms, and I
+            may tell you at once that our decision was unanimous in favour of
+            soldiers. You see, my dear Selkirk, in human nature the
+            attraction is towards the opposite. To a milliner's apprentice a
+            poet would no doubt be satisfying; to a woman of intelligence he
+            would be an unutterable bore. The man of brain is not for the
+            woman of brain. What the intellectual woman requires in man is
+            not something to argue with, but something to look at. To an
+            empty-headed woman I can imagine the soldier type proving vapid
+            and uninteresting; to the woman of mind he represents her ideal
+            of man&mdash;a creature strong, handsome, well-dressed, and not
+            too clever."</p>
+        </blockquote>
+
+        <p>"That gives us two votes for the army," remarked MacShaugnassy, as
+        Brown tore his sister's letter in two, and threw the pieces into the
+        waste-paper basket. "What says the common-sensed girl?"</p>
+
+        <p>"First catch your common-sensed girl," muttered Jephson, a little
+        grumpily, as it seemed to me. "Where do you propose finding her?"</p>
+
+        <p>"Well," returned MacShaugnassy, "I looked to find her in Miss
+        Medbury."</p>
+
+        <p>As a rule, the mention of Miss Medbury's name brings a flush of
+        joy to Jephson's face; but now his features wore an expression
+        distinctly approaching a scowl.</p>
+
+        <p>"Oh!" he replied, "did you? Well, then, the common-sensed girl
+        loves the military, also."</p>
+
+        <p>"By Jove!" exclaimed MacShaugnassy, "what an extraordinary thing.
+        What reason does she give?"</p>
+
+        <p>"That they look so nice when they're dressed, and that they dance
+        so divinely," answered Jephson, shortly.</p>
+
+        <p>"Well, you do surprise me," murmured MacShaugnassy, "I am
+        astonished."</p>
+
+        <p>Then to me he said: "And what does the young married woman say?
+        The same?"</p>
+
+        <p>"Yes," I replied, "precisely the same."</p>
+
+        <p>"Does <i>she</i> give a reason?" he asked.</p>
+
+        <p>"Oh, yes," I explained; "because you can't help liking them."</p>
+
+        <p>There was silence for the next few minutes, while we smoked and
+        thought. I fancy we were all wishing we had never started this
+        enquiry.</p>
+
+        <p>That four distinctly different types of educated womanhood should,
+        with promptness and unanimity quite unfeminine, have selected the
+        soldier as their ideal, was certainly discouraging to the civilian
+        heart. Had they been nursemaids or servant girls, I should have
+        expected it. The worship of Mars by the Venus of the white cap is one
+        of the few vital religions left to this devoutless age. A year or two
+        ago I lodged near a barracks, and the sight to be seen round its huge
+        iron gates on Sunday afternoons I shall never forget. The girls began
+        to assemble about twelve o'clock. By two, at which hour the army,
+        with its hair nicely oiled and a cane in its hand, was ready for a
+        stroll, there would be some four or five hundred of them waiting in a
+        line. Formerly they had collected in a wild mob, and as the soldiers
+        were let out to them two at a time, had fought for them, as lions for
+        early Christians. This, however, had led to scenes of such disorder
+        and brutality, that the police had been obliged to interfere; and the
+        girls were now marshalled in <i>queue</i>, two abreast, and
+        compelled, by a force of constables specially told off for the
+        purpose, to keep their places and wait their proper turn.</p>
+
+        <p>At three o'clock the sentry on duty would come down to the wicket
+        and close it. "They're all gone, my dears," he would shout out to the
+        girls still left; "it's no good your stopping, we've no more for you
+        to-day."</p>
+
+        <p>"Oh, not one!" some poor child would murmur pleadingly, while the
+        tears welled up into her big round eyes, "not even a little one. I've
+        been waiting <i>such</i> a long time."</p>
+
+        <p>"Can't help that," the honest fellow would reply, gruffly, but not
+        unkindly, turning aside to hide his emotion; "you've had 'em all
+        between you. We don't make 'em, you know: you can't have 'em if we
+        haven't got 'em, can you? Come earlier next time."</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/037-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/037-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "NOW THEN, PASS ALONG."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>Then he would hurry away to escape further importunity; and the
+        police, who appeared to have been waiting for this moment with
+        gloating anticipation, would jeeringly hustle away the weeping
+        remnant. "Now then, pass along, you girls, pass along," they would
+        say, in that irritatingly unsympathetic voice of theirs. "You've had
+        your chance. Can't have the roadway blocked up all the afternoon with
+        this 'ere demonstration of the unloved. You'll have to put up with
+        your ordinary young men for to-day. Pass along."</p>
+
+        <p>In connection with this same barracks, our charwoman told Amenda,
+        who told Ethelbertha, who told me a story, which I now told the
+        boys.</p>
+
+        <p>Into a certain house, in a certain street in the neighbourhood,
+        there moved one day a certain family. Their servant had left
+        them&mdash;most of their servants did at the end of a week&mdash;and
+        the day after the moving-in an advertisement was drawn up and sent to
+        the <i>Chronicle</i> for a domestic. It ran thus:</p>
+
+        <blockquote><p>
+            WANTED GENERAL SERVANT, in small family of eleven. Wages,
+            &pound;6; no beer money. Must be early riser and hard worker.
+            Washing done at home. Must be good cook, and not object to
+            window-cleaning. Unitarian preferred.&mdash;Apply, with
+            references, to A. B., &amp;C.</p>
+        </blockquote>
+
+        <p>That advertisement was sent off on Wednesday afternoon. At seven
+        o'clock on Thursday morning the whole family were awakened by
+        continuous ringing of the street door bell. The husband, looking out
+        of window, was surprised to see a crowd of about fifty girls
+        surrounding the house. He slipped on his dressing-gown and went down
+        to see what was the matter. The moment he opened the door, fifteen of
+        them charged tumultuously into the passage, sweeping him completely
+        off his legs. Once inside, these fifteen faced round, fought the
+        other thirty-five or so back on to the door-step, and slammed the
+        door in their faces. Then they picked up the master of the house, and
+        asked him politely to conduct them to "A. B."</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:50%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/038-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/038-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "SURPRISED TO SEE ABOUT FIFTY GIRLS."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>At first, owing to the clamour of the mob outside, who were
+        hammering at the door and shouting curses through the keyhole on
+        those inside, he was too confused to understand anything, but by dint
+        of great exertion they succeeded at length in explaining to him that
+        they were domestic servants come in answer to his wife's
+        advertisement. The man went and told his wife, and his wife said she
+        would see them, one at a time.</p>
+
+        <p>Which one should have audience first was a delicate question to
+        decide. The man, on being appealed to, said he would prefer to leave
+        it to them. They accordingly discussed the matter among themselves.
+        At the end of a quarter of an hour, the victor, having borrowed a
+        packet of pins and a looking-glass from our charwoman, who had slept
+        in the house, went upstairs, while the remaining fourteen sat down in
+        the hall, and fanned themselves with their bonnets.</p>
+
+        <p>"A. B." was a good deal astonished when the first applicant
+        presented herself. She was a tall, genteel-looking, well-dressed
+        girl. Up to yesterday she had been head housemaid at Lady Stanton's,
+        and before that she had been under-cook for two years to the Duchess
+        of York.</p>
+
+        <p>"And why did you leave Lady Stanton?" asked "A. B."</p>
+
+        <p>"To come here, mum," replied the girl.</p>
+
+        <p>The lady was puzzled.</p>
+
+        <p>"And you'll be satisfied with six pounds a year?" she asked.</p>
+
+        <p>"Certainly, mum, I think it ample."</p>
+
+        <p>"And you don't mind hard work?"</p>
+
+        <p>"I love it, mum."</p>
+
+        <p>"And you're an early riser?"</p>
+
+        <p>"Oh yes, mum, it upsets me stopping in bed after half-past
+        five."</p>
+
+        <p>"You know we do the washing at home?"</p>
+
+        <p>"Yes, mum. I think it so much better to do it at home. Those
+        laundries ruin good clothes. They're so careless."</p>
+
+        <p>"Are you a Unitarian?" continued the lady.</p>
+
+        <p>"Not yet, mum," replied the girl, "but I should like to be
+        one."</p>
+
+        <p>The lady took her reference, and said she would write her.</p>
+
+        <p>"I do hope you will give me a trial, mum," pleaded the girl, as
+        she rose to go; "I would try so hard to give you satisfaction."</p>
+
+        <p>The next applicant offered to come for three pounds&mdash;thought
+        six pounds too much. She also expressed her willingness to sleep in
+        the back kitchen: a shakedown under the sink was all she wanted. She
+        likewise had yearnings towards Unitarianism.</p>
+
+        <p>The third girl did not require any wages at all&mdash;could not
+        understand what servants wanted with wages&mdash;thought wages only
+        encouraged a love of foolish finery&mdash;thought a comfortable home
+        in a Unitarian family ought to be sufficient wages for any girl.</p>
+
+        <p>This girl said there was one stipulation she should like to make,
+        and that was that she should be allowed to pay for all breakages
+        caused by her own carelessness or neglect. She objected to holidays
+        and evenings out on principle; she held that they distracted a girl
+        from her work.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:30%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/039-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/039-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "MET THE NEXT DOOR LADY ON THE DOOR-STEP."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>The fourth candidate offered a premium of five pounds for the
+        place; and then "A.B." began to get frightened, and refused to see
+        any more of the girls, convinced that they must be lunatics from some
+        neighbouring asylum out for a walk.</p>
+
+        <p>Later in the day, meeting the next door lady on the door-step, she
+        related her morning's experiences.</p>
+
+        <p>"Oh, that's nothing extraordinary," said the next door lady; "none
+        of us on this side of the street pay wages; and we get the pick of
+        all the best servants in London. Why, girls will come from the other
+        end of the kingdom to get into one of these houses. It's the dream of
+        their lives. They save up for years, so as to be able to come here
+        for nothing."</p>
+
+        <p>"What's the attraction?" asked "A. B.," more amazed than ever.</p>
+
+        <p>"Why, don't you see," explained the next door lady, "our back
+        windows open upon the barrack yard. A girl living in one of these
+        houses is always close to soldiers. By looking out of window she can
+        always see soldiers; and sometimes a soldier will nod to her, or even
+        call up to her. They never dream of asking for wages. They'll work
+        eighteen hours a day, and put up with anything just to be allowed to
+        stop."</p>
+
+        <p>"A.B." profited by this information, and engaged the girl who
+        offered the five pounds premium. She found her a perfect treasure of
+        a servant. She was invariably willing and respectful, slept on a sofa
+        in the kitchen, and was always contented with an egg for her
+        dinner.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:60%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/040-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/040-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "A SOLDIER'S ARM ROUND THE WAIST."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>The truth of this story I cannot vouch for. Myself, I can believe
+        it. Brown and MacShaugnassy made no attempt to do so, which seemed
+        unfriendly. Jephson excused himself on the plea of a headache. I
+        admit there are points in it presenting difficulties to the average
+        intellect. As I explained at the commencement, it was told to me by
+        Ethelbertha, who had it from Amenda, who got it from the charwoman,
+        and exaggerations may have crept into it. The following, however,
+        were incidents that came under my own personal observation. They
+        afforded a still stronger example of the influence exercised by Tommy
+        Atkins upon the British domestic, and I therefore thought it right to
+        relate them also to the boys.</p>
+
+        <p>"The heroine of them," I said, "is our Amenda. Now, you would call
+        her a tolerably well-behaved, orderly young woman, would you
+        not?"</p>
+
+        <p>"She is my ideal of unostentatious respectability," answered
+        MacShaugnassy.</p>
+
+        <p>"That was my opinion also," I replied. "You can, therefore,
+        imagine my feelings on passing her one evening in the Folkestone High
+        Street with a Panama hat upon her head (my Panama hat), and a
+        soldier's arm round her waist. She was one of a mob, composed of all
+        the unoccupied riff-raff of Folkestone, who were following the band
+        of the Third Berkshire Infantry, then in camp at Sandgate. There was
+        an ecstatic, far-away look in her eyes. She was dancing rather than
+        walking, and with her left hand she beat time to the music."</p>
+
+        <p>"I should say you were suffering from a mild attack of D.T. when
+        you saw all that," said MacShaugnassy.</p>
+
+        <p>"So I might have thought myself," I said; "but Ethelbertha was
+        with me at the time, and she saw it too. We stared after the
+        procession until it had turned the corner, and then we stared at each
+        other.</p>
+
+        <p>"'Oh, it's impossible,' said Ethelbertha to me.</p>
+
+        <p>"'But that was my hat,' I said to Ethelbertha.</p>
+
+        <p>"The moment we reached home Ethelbertha looked for Amenda, and I
+        looked for my hat. Neither were to be found.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:30%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/041-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/041-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "AND HUNG MY HAT UP."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>"Nine o'clock struck, ten o'clock struck. At half-past ten, we
+        went down and got our own supper, and had it in the kitchen. At a
+        quarter-past eleven, Amenda returned. She walked into the kitchen
+        without a word, hung my hat up behind the door, and commenced
+        clearing away the supper things.</p>
+
+        <p>"Ethelbertha rose, calm but severe.</p>
+
+        <p>"'Where have you been, Amenda?' she enquired.</p>
+
+        <p>"'Gadding half over the county with a lot of low soldiers,'
+        answered Amenda, continuing her work.</p>
+
+        <p>"'You had on my hat,' I added, somewhat gloomily. It was not the
+        right view to take of the case, I know, but, personally, that fact
+        grieved me more than all the other incidents in the proceeding put
+        together, sad though I felt these to be. It was an expensive hat, and
+        Ethelbertha said it suited me (there are not many that do). After
+        seeing it that night on Amenda's head, my pride in it was gone.</p>
+
+        <p>"'Yes, sir,' replied Amenda, still continuing her work, 'it was
+        the first thing that came to hand. What I'm thankful for is that it
+        wasn't missis's best bonnet.'</p>
+
+        <p>"Whether Ethelbertha was mollified by the proper spirit displayed
+        in this last remark, I cannot say, but I think it probable. At all
+        events, it was in a voice more of sorrow than of anger that she
+        resumed her examination.</p>
+
+        <p>"'You were walking with a soldier's arm around your waist when we
+        passed you, Amenda?' she observed interrogatively.</p>
+
+        <p>"'I know, mum,' admitted Amenda, 'I found it there myself when the
+        music stopped.'</p>
+
+        <p>"Ethelbertha looked her enquiries. Amenda filled a saucepan with
+        water, and then replied to them.</p>
+
+        <p>"'I'm a disgrace to a decent household,' she said; 'no mistress
+        who respected herself would keep me a moment. I ought to be put out
+        on the doorstep with my box and a month's wages.'</p>
+
+        <p>"'But why did you do it then?' said Ethelbertha, with natural
+        astonishment.</p>
+
+        <p>"'Because I'm a helpless ninny, mum.' There was no trace of
+        bitterness or passion in Amenda's tones. She spoke in the calm, even
+        voice of a person stating facts.</p>
+
+        <p>"'I can't help myself,' she went on; 'if I see soldiers I'm bound
+        to follow them. It runs in our family. My poor cousin Emma was just
+        such another fool. She was engaged to be married to a quiet,
+        respectable young fellow with a shop of his own, and three days
+        before the wedding she ran off with a regiment of marines and married
+        the colour-sergeant. That's what I shall end by doing. I've been all
+        the way to Sandgate with that lot you saw me with, and I've kissed
+        four of them&mdash;the nasty wretches. I'm a nice sort of girl to be
+        walking out with a respectable milkman.'</p>
+
+        <p>"She was so deeply disgusted with herself that it seemed
+        superfluous for anybody else to be indignant with her; and
+        Ethelbertha changed her tone and tried to comfort her.</p>
+
+        <p>"'Oh, you'll get over all that nonsense, Amenda,' she said,
+        laughingly; 'you see yourself how silly it is. You must tell Mr.
+        Bowles to keep you away from soldiers.'</p>
+
+        <p>"'Ah, I can't look at it in the same light way that you do, mum,'
+        returned Amenda, somewhat reprovingly; 'a girl that can't see a bit
+        of red marching down the street without wanting to rush out and
+        follow it ain't fit to be anybody's wife. Why I should be leaving the
+        shop with nobody in it about twice a week, and he'd have to go the
+        round of all the barracks in London, looking for me. I shall save up
+        and get myself into a lunatic asylum, that's what I shall do.'</p>
+
+        <p>"Ethelbertha began to grow quite troubled. 'But surely this is
+        something altogether new, Amenda,' she said; 'you must have often met
+        soldiers when you've been out in London?'</p>
+
+        <p>"'Oh, yes, one or two at a time, walking about anyhow, I can stand
+        that all right. It's when there's a lot of them all together with a
+        band that I lose my head.'</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:50%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/043-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/043-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "'WHEN THERE'S A LOT OF THEM WITH A BAND, I LOSE MY HEAD.'"</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>"'You don't know what it's like, mum,' she added, noticing
+        Ethelbertha's puzzled expression; 'you've never had it. I only hope
+        you never may.'</p>
+
+        <p>"We kept a careful watch over Amenda during the remainder of our
+        stay at Folkestone, and an anxious time we had of it. Every day some
+        regiment or other would march through the town, and at the first
+        sound of its music Amenda would become restless and excited. The Pied
+        Piper's reed could not have stirred the Hamelin children deeper than
+        did those Sandgate bands the heart of our domestic. Fortunately, they
+        generally passed early in the morning when we were indoors, but one
+        day, returning home to lunch, we heard distant strains dying away
+        upon the Hythe Road. We hurried in. Ethelbertha ran down into the
+        kitchen; it was empty!&mdash;up into Amenda's bedroom; it was vacant!
+        We called. There was no answer.</p>
+
+        <p>"'That miserable girl has gone off again,' said Ethelbertha. 'What
+        a terrible misfortune it is for her. It's quite a disease.'</p>
+
+        <p>"Ethelbertha wanted me to go to Sandgate camp and enquire for her.
+        I was sorry for the girl myself, but the picture of a young and
+        innocent-looking man wandering about a complicated camp, enquiring
+        for a lost domestic, presenting itself to my mind, I said that I'd
+        rather not.</p>
+
+        <p>"Ethelbertha thought me heartless, and said that if I would not go
+        she would go herself. I replied that I thought one female member of
+        my household was enough in that camp at a time, and requested her not
+        to. Ethelbertha expressed her sense of my inhuman behaviour by
+        haughtily declining to eat any lunch, and I expressed my sense of her
+        unreasonableness by sweeping the whole meal into the grate, after
+        which Ethelbertha suddenly developed exuberant affection for the cat
+        (who didn't want anybody's love, but wanted to get under the grate
+        after the lunch), and I became supernaturally absorbed in the
+        day-before-yesterday's newspaper.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:30%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/044-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/044-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "'WHO LOCKED YOU IN THERE?'"</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>"In the afternoon, strolling out into the garden, I heard the
+        faint cry of a female in distress. I listened attentively, and the
+        cry was repeated. I thought it sounded like Amenda's voice, but where
+        it came from I could not conceive. It drew nearer, however, as I
+        approached the bottom of the garden, and at last I located it in a
+        small wooden shed, used by the proprietor of the house as a dark room
+        for developing photographs.</p>
+
+        <p>"The door was locked. 'Is that you, Amenda?' I cried through the
+        keyhole.</p>
+
+        <p>"'Yes, sir,' came back the muffled answer. 'Will you please let me
+        out; you'll find the key on the ground near the door.'</p>
+
+        <p>"I discovered it on the grass about a yard away, and released her.
+        'Who locked you in there?' I asked.</p>
+
+        <p>"'I did, sir,' she replied; 'I locked myself in, and pushed the
+        key out under the door. I had to do it, or I should have gone off
+        with those beastly soldiers.'</p>
+
+        <p>"'I hope I haven't inconvenienced you, sir,' she added, stepping
+        out; 'I left the lunch all laid.'"</p>
+
+        <p>Amenda's passion for soldiers was her one tribute to sentiment.
+        Towards all others of the male sex she maintained an attitude of
+        callous unsusceptibility, and her engagements with them (which were
+        numerous) were entered into or abandoned on grounds so sordid as to
+        seriously shock Ethelbertha.</p>
+
+        <p>When she came to us she was engaged to a pork butcher&mdash;with a
+        milkman in reserve. For Amenda's sake we dealt with the man, but we
+        never liked him, and we liked his pork still less. When, therefore,
+        Amenda announced to us that her engagement with him was "off," and
+        intimated that her feelings would in no way suffer by our going
+        elsewhere for our bacon, we secretly rejoiced.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:60%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/045-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/045-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "HER ENGAGEMENT WAS 'OFF.'"</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>"I am confident you have done right, Amenda," said Ethelbertha;
+        "you would never have been happy with that man."</p>
+
+        <p>"No, mum, I don't think I ever should," replied Amenda. "I don't
+        see how any girl could as hadn't got the digestion of an
+        ostrich."</p>
+
+        <p>Ethelbertha looked puzzled. "But what has digestion got to do with
+        it?" she asked.</p>
+
+        <p>"A pretty good deal, mum," answered Amenda, "when you're thinking
+        of marrying a man as can't make a sausage fit to eat."</p>
+
+        <p>"But, surely," exclaimed Ethelbertha, "you don't mean to say
+        you're breaking off the match because you don't like his
+        sausages!"</p>
+
+        <p>"Well, I suppose that's what it comes to," agreed Amenda,
+        unconcernedly.</p>
+
+        <p>"What an awful idea!" sighed poor Ethelbertha, after a long pause.
+        "Do you think you ever really loved him?"</p>
+
+        <p>"Oh, yes," said Amenda, "I loved him right enough, but it's no
+        good loving a man that wants you to live on sausages that keep you
+        awake all night."</p>
+
+        <p>"But does he want you to live on sausages?" persisted
+        Ethelbertha.</p>
+
+        <p>"Oh, he doesn't say anything about it," explained Amenda; "but you
+        know what it is, mum, when you marry a pork butcher: you're expected
+        to eat what's left over. That's the mistake my poor cousin Eliza
+        made. She married a muffin man. Of course, what he didn't sell they
+        had to finish up themselves. Why, one winter, when he had a run of
+        bad luck, they lived for two months on nothing but muffins. I never
+        saw a girl so changed in all my life. One has to think of these
+        things, you know."</p>
+
+        <p>Later on, she engaged herself to a solicitor's messenger. She did
+        this&mdash;as she frankly avowed to Ethelbertha&mdash;to assist her
+        family, who were prosecuting some petty law case at the time. He was
+        a smart, steady man, a great favourite with his employers, and, out
+        of kindly feeling towards him, they did the business for Amenda's
+        father, charging only "out-of-pockets."</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/046-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/046-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "GAVE HER A COCOANUT."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>Six months after the case was ended, she broke off the match. She
+        said that, on reflection, she could not help seeing what an advantage
+        he would have over her&mdash;he being in a solicitor's office, with
+        the law at his fingers' ends&mdash;should she ever find it necessary
+        to summons him.</p>
+
+        <p>"But, my good girl," said Ethelbertha, quite distressed, "one
+        doesn't marry a man with the idea of subsequently summonsing
+        him!"</p>
+
+        <p>"No, mum," said Amenda, "one always hopes one will never need to,
+        I'm sure, but it's just as well to be prepared. I knew a girl, when I
+        was in service at Hastings, that loved a printer, and they were both
+        going to commit suicide because her parents didn't want 'em to marry;
+        and now he costs her four shillings a month regular in summonses.
+        It's no good shutting one's eyes to things, mum."</p>
+
+        <p>But the most shamefully mercenary engagement that I think Amenda
+        ever entered into was one with a 'bus conductor. We were living in
+        the North of London then, and she had a young man, a cheesemonger,
+        who kept a shop in Lupus Street, Chelsea. He could not come up to her
+        because of the shop, so once a week she used to go down to him. One
+        did not ride ten miles for a penny in those days, and she found the
+        fare from Holloway to Victoria and back a severe tax upon her purse.
+        The same 'bus that took her down at six brought her back at ten.
+        During the first journey the 'bus conductor stared at Amenda; during
+        the second he talked to her, during the third he gave her a cocoanut,
+        during the fourth he proposed to her, and was promptly accepted.
+        After that, Amenda was enabled to visit her cheesemonger without
+        expense.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/047-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/047-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "'I DESIRE SHARING CROSS.'"</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>He was a quaint character himself, was this 'bus conductor. I
+        often rode with him to Fleet Street. He knew me quite well (I suppose
+        Amenda must have pointed me out to him), and would always ask me
+        after her&mdash;aloud, before all the other passengers, which was
+        trying&mdash;and give me messages to take back to her. Where women
+        were concerned he had what is called "a way" with him, and from the
+        extent and variety of his female acquaintance, and the evident
+        tenderness with which the majority of them regarded him, I am
+        inclined to hope that Amenda's desertion of him (which happened
+        contemporaneously with her jilting of the cheesemonger) caused him
+        less prolonged suffering than might otherwise have been the case.</p>
+
+        <p>He was a man from whom I derived a good deal of amusement one way
+        and another. Thinking of him brings back to my mind a somewhat odd
+        incident.</p>
+
+        <p>One afternoon, I jumped upon his 'bus in the Seven Sisters Road.
+        An elderly Frenchman was the only other occupant of the vehicle. "You
+        vil not forget me," the Frenchman was saying as I entered, "I desire
+        Sharing Cross."</p>
+
+        <p>"I won't forget yer," answered the conductor, "you shall 'ave yer
+        Sharing Cross. Don't make a fuss about it."</p>
+
+        <p>"That's the third time 'ee's arst me not to forget 'im," he
+        remarked to me in a stentorian aside; "'ee don't giv' yer much chance
+        of doin' it, does 'ee?"</p>
+
+        <p>At the corner of the Holloway Road we drew up, and our conductor
+        began to shout after the manner of his species: "Charing
+        Cross&mdash;Charing Cross&mdash;'ere yer are&mdash;Come along,
+        lady&mdash;Charing Cross."</p>
+
+        <p>The little Frenchman jumped up, and prepared to exit; the
+        conductor pushed him back.</p>
+
+        <p>"Sit down and don't be silly," he said; "this ain't Charing
+        Cross."</p>
+
+        <p>The Frenchman looked puzzled, but collapsed meekly. We picked up a
+        few passengers, and proceeded on our way. Half a mile up the
+        Liverpool Road a lady stood on the kerb regarding us as we passed
+        with that pathetic mingling of desire and distrust which is the
+        average woman's attitude towards conveyances of all kinds. Our
+        conductor stopped.</p>
+
+        <p>"Where d'yer want to go to?" he asked her severely&mdash;omnibus
+        conductors have a manner of addressing all pedestrians as though they
+        were lost children or suspicious
+        loiterers&mdash;"Strand&mdash;Charing Cross?"</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/048-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/048-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "THE CONDUCTOR COLLARED HIM."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>The Frenchman did not hear or did not understand the first part of
+        the speech, but he caught the words "Charing Cross," and bounced up
+        and out on to the step. The conductor collared him as he was getting
+        off, and jerked him back savagely.</p>
+
+        <p>"Carnt yer keep still a minute," he cried indignantly; "blessed if
+        you don't want lookin' after like a bloomin' kid."</p>
+
+        <p>"I vont to be put down at Sharing Cross," answered the little
+        Frenchman, humbly.</p>
+
+        <p>"You vont to be put down at Sharing Cross," repeated the other
+        bitterly, as he led him back to his seat. "I shall put yer down in
+        the middle of the road if I 'ave much more of yer. You stop there
+        till I come and sling yer out. I ain't likely to let yer go much past
+        yer Sharing Cross, I shall be too jolly glad to get rid o' yer."</p>
+
+        <p>The poor Frenchman subsided, and we jolted on. At "The Angel" we,
+        of course, stopped. "Charing Cross," shouted the conductor, and up
+        sprang the Frenchman.</p>
+
+        <p>"Oh, my Gawd," said the conductor, taking him by the shoulders and
+        forcing him down into the corner seat, "wot am I to do? Carnt
+        somebody sit on 'im?"</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/049-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/049-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "'BLESSED IF I DIDN'T RUN HIM ON TO VICTORIA.'"</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>He held him firmly down until the 'bus started, and then released
+        him. At the top of Chancery Lane the same scene took place, and the
+        poor little Frenchman became exasperated.</p>
+
+        <p>"He keep on saying Sharing Cross, Sharing Cross," he exclaimed,
+        turning to the other passengers; "and it is <i>not</i> Sharing Cross.
+        He is fool."</p>
+
+        <p>"Carnt yer understand," retorted the conductor, equally indignant;
+        "of course I say Sharing Cross&mdash;I mean Charing Cross, but that
+        don't mean that it <i>is</i> Charing Cross. That means that&mdash;"
+        and then perceiving from the blank look in the Frenchman's face the
+        utter impossibility of ever making the matter clear to him, he turned
+        to us with an appealing gesture, and asked:</p>
+
+        <p>"Does any gentleman know the French for 'bloomin' idiot'?"</p>
+
+        <p>A day or two afterwards, I happened to enter his omnibus
+        again.</p>
+
+        <p>"Well," I asked him, "did you get your French friend to Charing
+        Cross all right?"</p>
+
+        <p>"No, sir," he replied, "you'll 'ardly believe it, but I 'ad a bit
+        of a row with a policeman just before I got to the corner, and it put
+        'im clean out o' my 'ead. Blessed if I didn't run 'im on to
+        Victoria."</p>
+
+        <h5>(<i>To be continued</i>.)</h5>
+
+        <h2><a id="i13s4" name="i13s4"></a>THE SKATER.</h2>
+
+        <h3>BY WILLIAM CANTON.</h3>
+
+        <h4>ILLUSTRATED BY A. L. BOWLEY.</h4>
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/050-1.jpg"><img width="100%" src=
+        "images/050-1.jpg" alt="" /></a></p>
+
+        <table class="poetry">
+            <tbody>
+                <tr>
+                    <td>&nbsp;&nbsp; O'er glassy levels of the mere<br />
+                    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; She glides on slanting
+                    skate;<br />
+                    &nbsp;&nbsp; She loves in fairy curves to veer<br />
+                    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And weave her figure
+                    eight.<br />
+                    Bright flower in fur, I would thy feet<br />
+                    Could weave my heart and thine, my sweet,<br />
+                    Thus into one glad life complete!<br />
+                    &nbsp;&nbsp; Harsh winter, rage thy rudest:<br />
+                    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Freeze, freeze, thou churlish
+                    sky;<br />
+                    &nbsp;&nbsp; Blow, arctic wind, thy
+                    shrewdest&mdash;<br />
+                    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; What care my heart and
+                    I!<br /></td>
+                </tr>
+            </tbody>
+        </table>
+
+        <h2><a id="i13s5" name="i13s5"></a>MY SERVANT ANDREAS.</h2>
+
+        <h3>BY ARCHIBALD FORBES.</h3>
+
+        <h4>ILLUSTRATIONS BY FREDERIC VILLIERS.</h4>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/051-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/051-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "ANDREAS."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>I think it quite likely that some of my young American friends,
+        about ten months ago, were burning to have an opportunity of
+        accompanying General Miles down the Pacific coast, and of describing
+        in glowing sentences to their countrymen at home how Uncle Sam's
+        young man turned to flight the Chilian insurrectionists, who were
+        breathing out threatening and slaughter against the great Northern
+        Republic. There is an undoubted fascination in the picturesque and
+        adventurous life of the war correspondent. One must, of course, have
+        a distinct bent for the avocation, and if he is to succeed he must
+        possess certain salient attributes. He must expose himself to rather
+        greater risks than fall to the lot of the average fighting man,
+        without enjoying any of the happiness of retaliation which stirs the
+        blood of the latter; the correspondent must sit quietly on his horse
+        in the fire, and, while watching every turn in the battle, must wear
+        the aspect as if he rather enjoyed the storm of missiles than
+        otherwise. When the fighting is over, the soldier, if not killed,
+        generally can eat and sleep; ere the echoes of it are silent, the
+        correspondent of energy&mdash;and if he has not energy he is not
+        worth his salt&mdash;must already be galloping his hardest towards
+        the nearest telegraph wire, which, as like as not, is a hundred miles
+        distant. He must "get there," by hook or by crook, in a minimum of
+        time; and as soon as his message is on the wires, he must be hurrying
+        back to the army, else he may chance to miss the great battle of the
+        war. The correspondent must be most things to all men; he must have
+        the sweet, angelic temper of a woman, be as affable as if he were
+        running for office, and at the same time be big and ugly enough to
+        impress the conviction that it would be extremely unwise to take any
+        liberties with him.</p>
+
+        <p>The career, no doubt, has some incidental drawbacks. No fewer than
+        five British correspondents were killed in the recent campaigns in
+        the Soudan. General Sherman threatened to hang all the correspondents
+        found in his camp after a certain day, and General Sherman was the
+        kind of man to fulfil any threat he made. I suppose there was no
+        correspondent taking part in the Franco-German and Russo-Turkish wars
+        who was not in custody over and over again on suspicion of being a
+        spy. I have been a prisoner myself in France, Spain, Servia, Germany,
+        Austria, Hungary, Russia, Roumania and Bulgaria; and I may perhaps
+        venture to remark in passing that I cannot recommend any of these
+        countries from this point of view. But the casual confinements, half
+        irritating, half comic, to which he may be subjected, do not bother
+        the war correspondent of the old world nearly as much as do the
+        foreign languages which, if he is not a good linguist, hamper him
+        every hour of every day. He really should possess the gift of
+        tongues&mdash;be conversant with all European languages, a neat
+        assortment of the Asiatic languages, and a few of the African
+        tongues, such as Abyssinian, Ashantee, Zulu, and Soudanese. But how
+        few in the nature of things can approximate this polyglot
+        versatility. Often in Eastern Europe, and in Afghanistan, I have
+        envied Messrs. Swinton, Smalley, Whitelaw Reed, and the other notable
+        war correspondents of the American Civil War, in that they had not
+        the difficulties of outlandish tongues to contend with. I own myself
+        to be a poor linguist, and have many and many a time suffered for my
+        dullness of what the Scotch call "up-take." It is true that I was
+        fairly conversant with French and German, and could express my wants
+        in Russian, Roumanian, Bulgarian, Spanish, Turkish, Hindustanee,
+        Pushtoo, and Burmese, every word of which smatterings I have long
+        since forgotten. But the truth is that the poorest peoples in the
+        world in acquiring foreign languages are the English and the French;
+        the readiest are the Russians and Americans. It was, after a fashion,
+        a liberal education to listen to the fluency in some half-dozen
+        languages of Poor McGahan, the "Ohio boy," who graduated from the
+        plough to be perhaps the most brilliant war correspondent of modern
+        times. His compatriot and colleague, Frank Millet, who has fallen
+        away from glory as a war correspondent, and has taken to the inferior
+        trade of painting, seemed to pick up a language by the mere accident
+        of finding himself on the soil where it was spoken. In the first
+        three days, after crossing the Danube into Bulgaria, Millet went
+        about with book in hand, gathering in the names of things at which he
+        pointed, and jotting down each acquisition in the book. On the fourth
+        day he could swear in Bulgarian, copiously, fervently, and with a
+        measure of intelligibility. Within a week he had conquered the
+        uncouth tongue. As he voyaged lately down the Danube from source to
+        mouth, charmingly describing the scenic panorama of the great river
+        in the pages of <i>Harper</i>, those of you who have read those
+        sketches will not have failed to notice how Millet talked to German,
+        Hungarian, Servian, Bulgarian, Roumanian, and Turkish, each in his
+        own tongue, those diverse languages having been acquired by him
+        during the few months of the Russo-Turkish war.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/053-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/053-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "MACGAHAN AND FRANK MILLET."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>By this time, you may be wondering just where "Andreas" comes in.
+        Perhaps I have been over long in getting to my specific subject; but
+        I will not be discursive any more. It was at the <i>table d'hote</i>
+        in the Serbische Krone Hotel, in Belgrade, where I first set eyes on
+        Andreas. In the year 1876, Servia had thought proper to throw off the
+        yoke of her Turkish suzerain, and to attempt to assert her
+        independence by force of arms. But for very irregularly paid tribute
+        she was virtually independent already, and probably in all Servia
+        there were not two hundred Turks. But she ambitiously desired to have
+        the name of as well as the actuality of being independent; the
+        Russians helped her with arms, officers, and volunteer soldiers; and
+        when I reached Belgrade, in May of the year named, there had already
+        been fighting, in which the Servians had by no means got the worst.
+        No word of the Servian tongue had I, and it was the reverse of
+        pleasant for a war correspondent in such plight to learn that outside
+        of Belgrade nobody, or at least hardly anybody, knew a word of any
+        other language than the native Servian. As I ate, I was being
+        attended by a very assiduous waiter, whose alertness and anxiety to
+        please were very conspicuous. He was smart with quite un-Oriental
+        smartness; he whisked about the tables with deftness; he spoke to me
+        in German, to the Russian officers over against me in what I assumed
+        was Russian, to the Servians dining behind me in what I took to be
+        Servian. I liked the look of the man; there was intelligence in his
+        aspect. One could not call him handsome, but there was character in
+        the keen black eye, the high features and the pronounced chin,
+        fringed on either side by bushy black whiskers.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:60%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/054-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/054-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "ANDREAS AS A FORAGER."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>I had brought no servant with me; the average British servant is
+        worse than useless in a foreign country, and the dubiously-polyglot
+        courier is a snare and a deception on campaign. I had my eye on
+        Andreas for a couple of days, during which he was of immense service
+        to me. He seemed to know and stand well with everyone in Belgrade; it
+        was he, indeed, who presented me in the restaurant to the Prime
+        Minister and the Minister for War, who got together for me my field
+        necessaries, who helped me to buy my horses, and who narrated to me
+        the progress of the campaign so far as it had gone. On the third day
+        I had him in my room and asked whether he would like to come with me
+        into the field as my servant. He accepted the offer with effusion; we
+        struck hands on the compact; he tendered me credentials which I
+        ascertained to be extremely satisfactory; and then he gave me a
+        little sketch of himself. It was somewhat mixed, as indeed was his
+        origin. Primarily he was a Servian, but his maternal grandmother had
+        been a Bosniak, an earlier ancestress had been in a Turkish harem,
+        there was a strain in his blood of the Hungarian zinganee&mdash;the
+        gipsy of Eastern Europe, and one could not look at his profile
+        without a suspicion that there was a Jewish element in his pedigree.
+        "A pure mongrel," was what a gentleman of the British Legation termed
+        Andreas, and this self-contradictory epithet was scarcely out of
+        place.</p>
+
+        <p>Andreas turned out well. He was as hardy as a hill-goat, careless
+        how and when he ate, or where he slept, which, indeed, was mostly in
+        the open. It seemed to me that he had cousins all over Servia,
+        chiefly of the female persuasion, and I am morally certain that the
+        Turkish strain in his blood had in Andreas its natural development in
+        a species of <i>fin-de-si&egrave;cle</i> polygamy. Sherman's prize
+        "bummer" was not in it with Andreas as a forager. At first, indeed, I
+        suspected him of actual plundering, so copiously did he bring in
+        supplies, and so little had I to pay for them; but I was not long in
+        discovering that all kinds of produce were dirt cheap in Servia, and
+        that as I could myself buy a lamb for a quarter, it was not
+        surprising that Andreas, to the manner born, could easily obtain one
+        for half the money. He was an excellent horsemaster, and the stern
+        vigour with which he chastised the occasional neglect of the cousin
+        whom he had brought into my service as groom, was borne in upon me by
+        the frequent howls which were audible from the rear of my tent. There
+        was not a road in all Servia with whose every winding Andreas was not
+        conversant, and this "extensive and peculiar" knowledge of his was
+        often of great service to me. He was a light-weight and an excellent
+        rider; I have sent him off to Belgrade with a telegram at dusk, and
+        he was back again by breakfast time next morning, after a gallop of
+        quite a hundred miles.</p>
+
+        <p>No exertion fatigued him; I never saw the man out of humour; there
+        was but one matter in regard to which I ever had to chide him, and in
+        that I had perforce to let him have his own way, because I do not
+        believe that he could restrain himself. He had served the term in the
+        army which is, or was then, obligatory on all Servians; and on the
+        road or in camp he was rather more of a "peace at any price" man than
+        ever was the late Mr. John Bright himself. When the first fight
+        occurred, Andreas claimed to be allowed to witness it along with me.
+        I demurred; he might get hit; and if anything should happen to him,
+        what should I do for a servant? At length I gave him the firm order
+        to remain in camp, and started myself with the groom behind me on my
+        second horse. The fighting occurred eight miles from camp, and in the
+        course of it, leaving the groom in the rear, I had accompanied the
+        Russian General Dochtouroff into a most unpleasantly hot place, where
+        a storm of Turkish shells were falling in the effort to hinder the
+        withdrawal of a disabled Servian battery. I happened to glance over
+        my shoulder, and lo! Andreas on foot was at my horse's tail,
+        obviously in a state of ecstatic enjoyment of the situation. I
+        peremptorily ordered him back, and he departed sullenly, calmly
+        strolling along the line of Turkish fire. Just then, Tchernaieff, the
+        Servian Commander-in-Chief, had, it seemed, ordered a detachment of
+        infantry to take in flank the Turkish guns. From where we stood I
+        could discern the Servian soldiers hurrying forward close under the
+        fringe of a wood near the line of retirement along which Andreas was
+        sulking. Andreas saw them too, and retreated no step further, but cut
+        across to them, snatching up a gun as he ran, and the last I saw of
+        him was while he was waving on the militiamen with his billycock, and
+        loosing off an occasional bullet, while he emitted yells of defiance
+        against the Turks, which might well have struck terror into their
+        very marrow. Andreas came into camp at night very streaky with powder
+        stains, minus the lobe of one ear, uneasy as he caught my eye, yet
+        with a certain elateness of mien. I sacked him that night, and he
+        said he didn't care, and that he was not ashamed of himself. Next
+        morning, as I was rising, he rushed into the tent, knelt down,
+        clasped my knees, and bedewed my ankles with his tears. Of course I
+        reinstated him; I couldn't do without him, and I think he knew
+        it.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:60%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/056-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/056-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "SNATCHING UP A GUN AS HE RAN."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>But I had yielded too easily. Andreas had established a precedent.
+        He insisted, in a quiet, positive manner, on accompanying me to every
+        subsequent battle; and I had to consent, always taking his pledge
+        that he would obey the injunctions I might lay upon him. And, as a
+        matter of course, he punctually and invariably violated that pledge
+        when the crisis of the fighting was drawing to a head, and just when
+        this "peace at any price" man could not control the bloodthirst that
+        was parching him.</p>
+
+        <p>One never knows how events are to fall out. It happened that this
+        resolution on the part of Andreas to accompany me into the fights
+        once assuredly saved my life. It was on the day of Djunis, the last
+        battle fought by the Servians. In the early part of the day there was
+        a good deal of scattered woodland fighting in front of the entrenched
+        line, which they abandoned when the Turks came on in earnest. Andreas
+        and I were among the trees trying to find a position from which
+        something was to be seen, when all of a sudden I, who was in advance,
+        plumped right into the centre of a small scouting party of Turks.
+        They tore me out of the saddle, and I had given myself up for
+        lost&mdash;for the Turks took no prisoners, their cheerful practice
+        being to slaughter first and then abominably to mutilate&mdash;when
+        suddenly Andreas dashed in among my captors, shouting aloud in a
+        language which I took to be Turkish, since he bellowed "Effendi" as
+        he pointed to me. He had thrown away his billycock and substituted a
+        fez, which he afterwards told me he always carried in case of
+        accidents, and in one hand he waved a dingy piece of parchment with a
+        seal dangling from it, which I assumed was some obsolete firman. The
+        result was truly amazing, and the scene had some real humour in it.
+        With profound salaams, the Turks unhanded me, helped me to mount,
+        and, as I rode off at a tangent with Andreas at my horse's head,
+        called after me what sounded like friendly farewells. When we were
+        back among the Russians&mdash;I don't remember seeing much of the
+        Servians later on that day&mdash;Andreas explained that he had passed
+        himself for the Turkish dragoman of a British correspondent whom the
+        Padishah delighted to honour, and that, after expressing a burning
+        desire to defile the graves of their collective female ancestry, he
+        had assured my captors that they might count themselves as dead men
+        if they did not immediately release me. To his ready-witted conduct I
+        undoubtedly owe the ability to write now this record of a man of
+        curiously complicated nature.</p>
+
+        <p>When the campaign ended with the Servian defeat at Djunis, Andreas
+        went back to his headwaitership at the Serbische Krone in Belgrade.
+        Before leaving that capital I had the honour of being present at his
+        nuptials, a ceremony the amenity of which was somewhat disturbed by
+        the violent incursion into the sacred edifice of sundry ladies all
+        claiming to have prior claims on the bridegroom of the hour. They
+        were, however, placated, and subsequently joined the marriage feast
+        in the great arbour behind the Krone. Andreas faithfully promised to
+        come to me to the ends of the earth on receipt of a telegram, if I
+        should require his services, and he were alive.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:60%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/058-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/058-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "ANDREAS DASHED IN AMONG MY CAPTORS."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>Next spring the Russo-Turkish war broke out, and I hurried
+        eastward in time to see the first Cossack cross the Pruth. I had
+        telegraphed to Andreas from England to meet me at Bazias on the
+        Danube below Belgrade. Bazias is the place where the railway used to
+        end, and where we took steamer for the Lower Danube. Andreas was duly
+        on hand, ready and serviceable as of old, a little fatter, and a
+        trifle more consequential than when we had last parted. He was, if
+        possible, rather more at home in Bucharest than he had been in
+        Belgrade, and recommended me to Brofft's Hotel, in comparison with
+        which the charges of the Brunswick in New York are infinitesimal. He
+        bought my wagon and team, he found riding horses when they were said
+        to be unprocurable, he constructed a most ingenious tent, of which
+        the wagon was, so to speak, the roof-tree, he laid in stores,
+        arranged for relays of couriers, and furnished me with a coachman in
+        the person of a Roumanian Jew who he one day owned was a distant
+        connection, and whose leading attribute was, that he could survive
+        more sleep than any other human being I have ever known. We took the
+        field auspiciously, Mr. Frederic Villiers, the war artist of the
+        London <i>Graphic</i>, being my campaigning comrade. Thus early I
+        discerned a slight rift in the lute. Andreas did not like Villiers,
+        which showed his bad taste, or rather, perhaps, the narrowness of his
+        capacity of affection; and I fear Villiers did not much like Andreas,
+        whom he thought too familiar. This was true, and it was my fault; but
+        really it was with difficulty that I could bring myself to treat
+        Andreas as a servant. He was more, in my estimation, in the nature of
+        the confidential major-domo, and to me he was simply invaluable.
+        Villiers had to chew his moustache, and glower discontentedly at
+        Andreas.</p>
+
+        <p>I had some good couriers for the conveyance of despatches back
+        across the Danube to Bucharest, whence everything was telegraphed to
+        London; but they were essentially fair-weather men. The casual
+        courier may be alert, loyal, and trustworthy; he may be relied on to
+        try his honest best, but it is not to be expected of him that he will
+        greatly dare and count his life but as dross when his incentive to
+        enterprise is merely filthy lucre. But I could trust Andreas to dare
+        and to endure&mdash;to overcome obstacles, and, if man could, to "get
+        there," where, in the base-quarters in Bucharest, the amanuenses were
+        waiting to copy out in round hand for the foreign telegraphist the
+        rapid script of the correspondent scribbling for life in the saddle
+        or the cleft of a commanding tree while the shells were whistling
+        past. We missed him dreadfully when he was gone&mdash;even Villiers,
+        who liked good cooking, owned to thinking long for his return. For,
+        in addition to his other virtues, Andreas was a capital cook. It is
+        true that his courses had a habit of arriving at long and uncertain
+        intervals. After a dish of pungent stew, no other viands appearing to
+        loom in the near future, Villiers and myself would betake ourselves
+        to smoking, and perhaps on a quiet day would lapse into slumber. From
+        this we would be aroused by Andreas to partake of a second course of
+        roast chicken, the bird having been alive and unconscious of its
+        impending fate when the first course had been served. No man is
+        perfect, and as regarded Andreas there were some petty spots on the
+        sun. He had, for instance, a mania for the purchase of irrelevant
+        poultry, and for accommodating the fowls in our wagon, tied by the
+        legs, against the day of starvation, which he always, but
+        causelessly, apprehended. I do not suppose any reader has ever had
+        any experience of domestic poultry as bedfellows, and I may caution
+        him earnestly against making any such experiment.</p>
+
+        <p>I do not know whether it is a detraction from Andreas's worth to
+        mention that another characteristic of his was the habit of awaking
+        us in the still watches of the night, for the purpose of imparting
+        his views on recondite phases of the great Eastern question. But how
+        trivial were such peccadilloes in a man who was so resolute not to be
+        beaten in getting my despatch to the telegraph wire, that once, when
+        three pontoons of the bridge across the Danube were sunk, he crossed
+        the gap hand over hand by the hand-rope, sloshing down with the
+        current as the slack of the rope gave to his weight! Andreas became
+        quite an institution in the Russian camp. When Ignatieff, the Tsar's
+        intimate, the great diplomatist who has now curiously fizzled out,
+        would honour us by partaking sometimes of afternoon tea in our tent,
+        he would call Andreas by his name and call him "Molodetz"&mdash;the
+        Russian for "brave fellow." In the Servian campaign Dochtouroff had
+        got him the Takova cross, which Andreas sported with great pride, and
+        Ignatieff used to tell him that the Tsar was seriously thinking of
+        conferring on him the Cross of St. George, badinage which Andreas
+        took as dead earnest. MacGahan used gravely to entreat him to take
+        greater care of his invaluable life, and hint that if any calamity
+        occurred to him, the campaign would <i>ipso facto</i> come to an end.
+        Andreas knew that MacGahan was quizzing him, but it was exceedingly
+        droll how he purred and bridled under the light touch of that genial
+        humourist, whose merits his own countrymen, to my thinking, have
+        never adequately recognised. The old story of a prophet having scant
+        honour in his own country.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/060-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/060-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "CROSSED THE GAP HAND OVER HAND."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>After the long strain of the desperate but futile attack made by
+        the Russians on Plevna in the early part of the September of the war,
+        I fell a victim to the malarial fever of the Lower Danube, and had to
+        be invalided back to Bucharest. The illness grew upon me, and my
+        condition became very serious. Worthy Andreas nursed me with great
+        tenderness and assiduity in the lodgings to which I had been brought,
+        since they would not accept a fever patient at Brofft's. After some
+        days of wretchedness I became delirious, and, of course, lost
+        consciousness; my last recollection was of Andreas wetting my parched
+        lips with lemonade. When I recovered my senses, and looked out
+        feebly, there was nobody in the room. How long I had been unconscious
+        I had no idea. I lay there in a half stupor till evening, unable from
+        weakness to summon any assistance. In the dusk came the English
+        doctor who had been attending me. "Where is Andreas?" he asked. I
+        could not tell him. "He was here last night," he said; "you have been
+        delirious for seven days." The woman of the house was summoned. She
+        had not seen Andreas since the previous night, but, busy about her
+        own domestic affairs, had no suspicion until she entered the room
+        that Andreas was not with me still.</p>
+
+        <p>Andreas never returned. It appeared that he had taken away all his
+        belongings. One day, when gradually mending, I put my hand under the
+        pillow with intent to find my watch, which was an heirloom, and wind
+        it up. I could find no watch. No more could I find the bag of ducats
+        which was alongside the watch before I lost my senses. Search was
+        made throughout the room without success, and, with whatever
+        reluctance to believe a thing so utterly unlikely, I could not
+        refrain from the conviction that Andreas must have carried off both
+        money and watch. The thought caused a relapse, but at length I
+        attained convalescence, and was able to drive out. But the doctor was
+        firm that during the now imminent winter I was not to return to the
+        field. Fortunately, my able colleagues, MacGahan and Millet, were
+        there; and I was therefore the less distressed by Dr.
+        &mdash;&mdash;'s peremptory sentence on me. I was condemned to return
+        to England as soon as I should be strong enough to travel.</p>
+
+        <p>When I had to leave the Plevna front, my colleagues temporarily
+        took charge of my field equipment. But I had brought back to
+        Bucharest my best riding horse, and during my illness he had been
+        standing at livery in the stables of the English Tramway Company.
+        Determining now on the melancholy necessity of selling an animal
+        which had on many a hard day and many a long night-ride served me
+        staunchly, I drove to the stables, and instructed the manager to sell
+        my horse. "Your horse!" he exclaimed, in evident surprise; "your
+        horse was sold weeks ago! Your man, Andreas, came here with a message
+        that we were to dispose of it; and I sold it next day to General
+        Todleben on his way through Bucharest to take the command before
+        Plevna. It fetched a good price, 105 ducats, more than you gave for
+        it; Andreas called for the money, and, of course, I gave it to
+        him."</p>
+
+        <p>So Andreas was thief and rogue&mdash;deliberate thief and rogue. I
+        was angry, but I was yet more heart-sorry that so fine and true a
+        native should have thus fallen. Just as I was leaving Bucharest for
+        England, a letter came to me from a friend in Galatz, a commercial
+        city of Roumania, near the mouth of the Danube. Its P.S. only is
+        worth quoting. "So you have parted with your man, Andreas. I thought
+        from what you had told me that you would retain him for life. He is
+        here now, I saw him drunk in the street yesterday. He told Kennedy
+        that he believed you were dead."</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:60%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/062-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/062-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "ANDREAS DROPPED ON HIS KNEES."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>I went straight to Galatz, a long half-day's journey. Andreas was
+        not hard to find; he was smoking in the "Concordia" saloon. I saw him
+        before he saw me; he had a furtive air, he was pallid and his lips
+        twitched; he looked to me on the verge of <i>delirium tremens</i>. I
+        approached him from behind, and uttered the one word, "Andreas!" At
+        the word, he started as if he had been shot, spun round, dropped on
+        his knees, with his hands raised beseechingly, and cried in a broken
+        voice, "Before God, master, I thought you were dead, else I should
+        never have done it! I have not had a happy moment since I threw away
+        my good name&mdash;I could not go home! Kill me, send me to prison,
+        punish me how you choose. I shall rejoice to suffer!" And the poor
+        wretch grovelled before me on his stomach.</p>
+
+        <p>I had meant to punish him; but he was too broken for chastisement.
+        I could not send to prison the man who had saved my life among the
+        pine-trees of Djunis. I wonder if he really thought me dead&mdash;not
+        that, if so, his act was thereby materially palliated. And I thought
+        of two little sentences which my mother taught me when I was a child:
+        "Judge not that ye be not judged," and "Lead us not into temptation."
+        I pulled the man on to his feet and grasped his hand, then with the
+        words, "Give me my father's watch&mdash;good-bye, Andreas. I shall
+        remember all the good in you, and forget those last bad days." I
+        turned from him, and quitted the "Concordia" with a lump in my throat
+        that I could not swallow down.</p>
+
+        <h2><a id="i13s6" name="i13s6"></a>TOLD BY THE COLONEL.</h2>
+
+        <h3>X.</h3>
+
+        <h2>A MATRIMONIAL ROMANCE.</h2>
+
+        <h3>BY W. L. ALDEN.</h3>
+
+        <h4>ILLUSTRATIONS BY R. JACK.</h4>
+
+        <p>"And by the way," continued the Colonel, "a curious thing about
+        this Josiah Wilson was that he was married for fifteen years and
+        never had any wife whatever."</p>
+
+        <p>The Colonel had begun a story concerning one Josiah Wilson, which
+        promised to be interesting, but his incidental allusion to Mr.
+        Wilson's matrimonial experience awakened our curiosity, and we begged
+        him to interrupt his narrative long enough to tell us how it came to
+        pass that Josiah was a married man who never had a wife.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/063-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/063-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "HOWLED FOR HELP."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>"The marriage laws in the United States," said the Colonel, giving
+        his chair an increased tilt backwards, which was his usual way of
+        beginning a fresh anecdote, "are as peculiar in their way as are the
+        divorce laws. You would think to look at them that they would permit
+        anybody to marry anybody else in any way that either of them might
+        choose, but for all that they sometimes make it impossible for a man
+        or a woman to get married. There was a couple who intended to be
+        married in a balloon, which is a style of lunacy that is quite
+        fashionable in some parts of the country, though I can't see why a
+        man should want to risk his neck in a balloon on his wedding day
+        unless it is that it takes so much courage to be married at all that
+        a man forgets all about such minor dangers as are connected with
+        ballooning. The bride, the minister, and two witnesses of assorted
+        sexes went up in the balloon at the appointed time, and, naturally,
+        the bridegroom intended to go with them, but he accidentally caught
+        his foot in a neglected guy-rope, and went up head downwards about
+        twenty feet below the car. The party in the balloon could not haul
+        him up because they could not get hold of the rope, and the bride
+        would not consent to give up the trip, because the groom had always
+        been a little shy, and she was afraid that, if she let him go this
+        time, she might not be able to land him again. So the parson went on
+        with the ceremony, and the groom made most of his responses in bad
+        language, and howled for help when he wasn't swearing. When the
+        ceremony was over, the aeronaut managed to land the balloon without
+        seriously damaging the bridegroom, but when, a year or two
+        afterwards, the bride wanted to get her divorce, the court held that
+        there had never been any marriage, for the reason that both the groom
+        and the bride had not appeared together in the presence of the
+        officiating minister, and that, furthermore, there was no provision
+        in the law which would permit a man to be married upside down.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/064-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/064-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "SMITH'S BULL-DOG."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>"But to get back to Josiah Wilson. He lived in Indiana, close to
+        the boundary line between that State and Illinois, and he courted
+        Melinda Smith, a young woman who lived a little way up the mountain
+        side with her father and three brothers. The girl was anxious to be
+        married, but her family was dead against it. You see Josiah was a
+        Republican and a Methodist, while the Smiths were Democrats and
+        Baptists, and, naturally, they hated each other like poison, and one
+        night as old man Smith and Josiah met on their way to rival prayer
+        meetings, they exchanged revolver shots, without, however, doing any
+        harm. Then once Josiah had most of the calf of his leg taken off by
+        the Smiths' bull-dog, and twice the Smith boys came into the
+        sitting-room where Josiah was calling on Melinda, and suggested to
+        him with their shot-guns that he had better go home. Gradually Josiah
+        and Melinda came to the conclusion that her family was resolved to
+        discourage the match, so they determined to elope and be married
+        without the knowledge or consent of anybody.</p>
+
+        <p>"One dark night Josiah carried a ladder and planted it under
+        Melinda's window. He had advised her to walk out of the front door,
+        which was always left unlocked at night, but she refused, saying that
+        if she was going to elope she should do it in the proper way, and
+        that if Josiah had no respect for her, she had some little respect
+        for herself. She climbed down the ladder with a good deal of
+        difficulty, because she insisted that Josiah should help her, and
+        also that he should stand forty yards away, for reasons connected
+        with her ankles, and he found it rather trying to follow out these
+        contradictory orders. However, Melinda reached the ground at last,
+        and the pair started in a carriage that had been waiting just around
+        a bend in the road, in company with the Methodist minister. Their
+        plan was to drive to the next town and there to be married, but it
+        happened that one of the Smith boys, being restless, got up in the
+        night, and, looking out of the window, saw the ladder standing at
+        Melinda's window. In about twenty minutes after the young people had
+        started, the whole Smith family and their shot-guns were following
+        the runaways in a waggon, and gaining on them fast.</p>
+
+        <p>"The Methodist minister, whose hearing was unusually good, heard
+        the sound of hoofs before Josiah noticed it, and told the young
+        people that there was not the least doubt that they were pursued, and
+        would be overtaken in a very few minutes. 'And then, you know,' he
+        added, 'the chances are that, being Baptists, they will shoot first,
+        and ask for explanations afterwards. The only thing for us to do is
+        to get the marriage ceremony over before they come up. Then they will
+        see that opposition is of no use, and will listen to reason.'</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:60%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/065-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/065-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "THEY WERE MARRIED."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>"Josiah and Melinda at once consented, and the parson, noticing a
+        little clearing in the woods on the left hand side of the road, and a
+        flat sort of tombstone standing in the middle of it, said that he
+        would stand on that stone and marry his young friends so quick that
+        it would make their hair curl. He was particularly glad to meet with
+        a handy tombstone, for he said that a tombstone was the next thing to
+        a church, and that to be married by the side of a tomb would be
+        almost as solemn as to be married in a minister's study. So the party
+        hastily descended; the parson mounted the stone; Josiah and Melinda
+        joined hands in front of him, and they were married, and the parson
+        had kissed the bride and pocketed his fee just as the Smiths' waggon
+        drove up and the Smith boys cocked their guns and covered the party.
+        But the parson was wide awake. He had his revolver out and old man
+        Smith covered before anybody had taken aim at him, but, instead of
+        shooting, he remarked that he was a minister of the blessed gospel of
+        peace; that there was no necessity for bloodshed, and that he would
+        blow a hole through old Smith unless the Smith boys lowered their
+        weapons and consented to argue the matter. 'The fact is, Colonel
+        Smith,' said the parson, 'you're too late. The young people are
+        legally married, and the sooner you accept the situation the better.
+        I married them not two minutes ago, standing on that identical
+        tombstone.'</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:60%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/066-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/066-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "'YOU'LL COME STRAIGHT HOME WITH ME.'"</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>"Colonel Smith was a lawyer, and the sharpest one in that part of
+        the country. He saw the force of the minister's remarks, so he told
+        the boys to put up their guns, and he shook hands with the minister.
+        Then he inquired, in a careless sort of way, where Josiah and Melinda
+        had stood while they were being married. The parson showed the
+        footprints of the bride and groom, and then Colonel Smith turned to
+        Melinda and said, 'You'll come straight home with me. There hasn't
+        been any marriage yet. That stone is the boundary mark between
+        Indiana and Illinois, and you were standing in Indiana and that other
+        idiot was standing in Illinois when the parson tried to marry you.
+        Nobody can marry in two States at the same time, and I shan't
+        recognise the pretended marriage till a court of law compels me to do
+        so, which will be never. I hope this will teach you the folly of
+        fooling with Methodism. When you want to get married next time try a
+        Baptist minister, who will know the difference between a tombstone
+        and a boundary mark.' There were too many Smiths, and they were too
+        well armed to be reasoned with successfully, so the upshot was that
+        Melinda went home with her family, and Josiah and the parson went to
+        see a lawyer.</p>
+
+        <p>"The next day Josiah brought a suit for divorce against Melinda.
+        It was a friendly suit, you understand, and his only object was to
+        test the question of the validity of his marriage, for, of course, no
+        man can get a divorce unless he first proves that he is married. Old
+        man Smith conducted the case on his side, and a lawyer named
+        Starkweather, who is now a member of the Illinois Legislature,
+        appeared for Josiah Wilson. Colonel Smith argued that while the
+        parson who conducted the alleged marriage ceremony could undoubtedly
+        have married a couple in the State of Indiana, he could not marry a
+        woman in Indiana to a man in Illinois, for the reason that the man
+        and the woman could not be in the same place while they were in two
+        different commonwealths, and that hence Josiah and Melinda had not
+        legally appeared together before the officiating minister.
+        Furthermore, he argued that the minister at the time of the pretended
+        marriage was standing neither in Indiana nor in Illinois, but on the
+        boundary line; that the statute defined the boundary line as 'an
+        imaginary line' running from such and such a point to such and such a
+        point, and that a minister who stands in a purely imaginative
+        locality stands virtually nowhere, and hence cannot perform any
+        function of his calling.</p>
+
+        <p>"On the other hand, Josiah's lawyer claimed that the minister had
+        married Melinda Smith in the State of Indiana; that consequently she
+        must have been married to somebody, and that that somebody was
+        unquestionably Josiah Wilson. As to the point that the minister stood
+        in an imaginary locality because, as was alleged, he stood on the
+        boundary line, the lawyer maintained that it was a physical
+        impossibility that a minister weighing two hundred and fifty pounds
+        could stand in a purely imaginative place. Moreover, he was prepared
+        to prove that, while performing the ceremony, at least one of the
+        minister's feet was in the State of Indiana, which was sufficient to
+        make him legally present in that State.</p>
+
+        <p>"The arguments lasted three days, and the court before which it
+        was tried, consisting of three judges, took all the third day to
+        deliver its verdict. It decided that Melinda Smith was legally
+        married to some person unknown, though not to Josiah Wilson, and that
+        Josiah Wilson was also married to some unknown woman, who was not
+        Melinda Smith, whoever else she might be; that no marriage between
+        the plaintiff and the defendant had ever taken place, and that no
+        divorce could be granted, but that if either of them married anyone
+        else, he or she would be guilty of bigamy.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:30%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/068-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/068-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "SHE WAS A GOOD DEAL CAST DOWN."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>"The Smiths, with the exception of Melinda, were delighted with
+        the decision, for it made it reasonably certain that Josiah could
+        never be recognised as her husband. She was a good deal cast down
+        about it, for, like every other Indiana girl, she had looked forward
+        to being married and divorced as the natural lot of woman. Now it
+        appeared that she was married, but in such an unsatisfactory way,
+        that she could never have a husband, and never be divorced from
+        anyone. As for Josiah, he was furious, but there was no help for it,
+        the law was against him, and, as a law-abiding man, he was obliged to
+        respect it, especially as he could not hope to kill off all four of
+        the Smiths, if he decided to make a family feud of it; he himself
+        having no family whatever, and no one to help him to keep up his end
+        of the feud.</p>
+
+        <p>"For the next fifteen years Josiah lived a single man except in
+        name, and Melinda mourned her hard fate and kept house for her father
+        and brothers; but one day Josiah's lawyer, who was by this time in
+        the Legislature, came to him and offered to have his marriage to
+        Melinda made legal in all respects for five hundred dollars. The
+        lawyer was so certain that he could do this that he was willing to
+        wait for his pay until after he had gained a verdict, and Josiah,
+        after a little bargaining such as every self-respecting man would
+        have made, in his place, consented to the lawyer's terms. It seems
+        that the lawyer had accidentally discovered that there had been a
+        mistake in the survey of part of the boundary line between Indiana
+        and Illinois, and at the very place where Josiah and Melinda were
+        married, A rectification of this mistake would move the line ten feet
+        west, and so place the spot where the pair stood during their wedding
+        entirely within the state of Indiana. The proper steps to obtain the
+        rectification of the boundary were taken, and it was rectified. Then
+        Melinda in her turn began a suit for divorce against Josiah, and had
+        no difficulty in proving the marriage and in obtaining a decree.
+        Josiah paid the lawyer his five hundred dollars, and was overjoyed at
+        being finally able to call his Melinda his own. But he met with a
+        little disappointment. Now that Melinda had obtained her divorce she
+        thought she might as well live up to it, and marry a fresh husband.
+        So she married the Methodist minister, who had just lost his third
+        wife, and lived happily ever afterwards.</p>
+
+        <p class="figure" style="clear:both;"><a href=
+        "images/069-1.jpg"><img src="images/069-1.jpg" width="80%" alt=
+        "" /></a><br />
+        "OFFERED TO HAVE HIS MARRIAGE MADE LEGAL."</p>
+
+        <p>"It was just after this that Josiah, being perhaps made a little
+        reckless by his disappointment, became involved in the affair that I
+        was going to tell you about when you interrupted me, and wanted to
+        hear about his marriage. Matrimony is a mighty curious thing, and you
+        can never tell precisely how it is going to turn out. That is one
+        reason why I was never married but once, though I spent ten years of
+        my life in Chicago, and had friends at bar who stood ready to obtain
+        divorces for me at any moment and without a dollar of expense."</p>
+        <hr />
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/070-1.jpg"><img src=
+        "images/070-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+        IDLERS.</p>
+
+        <h2><a id="i13s7" name="i13s7"></a>"LIONS IN THEIR DENS."</h2>
+
+        <h2>No. II.&mdash;GEORGE GROSSMITH AND THE HUMOUR OF HIM.</h2>
+
+        <h3>BY RAYMOND BLATHWAYT.</h3>
+
+        <h4>ILLUSTRATIONS BY GEO. HUTCHINSON.</h4>
+
+        <h4>(<i>Photographs by Messrs. Fraddle and Young and Alfred
+        Ellis.</i>)</h4>
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/071-1.jpg"><img src=
+        "images/071-1.jpg" width="80%" alt="" /></a><br />
+        MR. GEORGE GROSSMITH.</p>
+
+        <p>A little, slight man, with a thin, clever, mobile, clean-shaven
+        face, a sharp inquisitive nose surmounted by a perpetual pair of
+        <i>pince-nez</i>, and a rather sarcastic mouth, from which wit and
+        humour as light and airy as the cigarette smoke which accompanied
+        each remark continually flowed.</p>
+
+        <p>Mr. George Grossmith, the well-known actor and society clown.</p>
+
+        <p>He stands on the hearthrug of his own special sanctum in his
+        handsome house in Dorset Square, with his back to the fire, cigarette
+        in his mouth, his hands now in his pockets, now waving in the air, as
+        he vivaciously tells me the story of his busy, energetic and
+        wonderfully interesting life.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/072-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/072-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            MRS. GEORGE GROSSMITH.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>"I was born," said he, "in 1847. I come of a family of actors and
+        reciters. My father, whose portrait you see there on the wall, was a
+        well-known lecturer and entertainer. Sixty or seventy years ago my
+        uncle created a great sensation as a child actor, and he was commonly
+        known as the 'celebrated infant Roscius.' Come out into the hall,"
+        continued the lively little entertainer, "and I will show you some
+        old engravings which represent him in his favourite characters. Then
+        my brother Weedon, as you know, is, of course, a well-known actor, as
+        well as a clever artist, and part author with myself of several
+        sketches which have appeared in <i>Punch</i>. My eldest son now
+        begins to display the family tendency to a most alarming extent. For
+        my own part, I started my career as a reporter at Bow Street Police
+        Court, a training which I have found invaluable in many respects ever
+        since. My subsequent history as actor and society clown is so well
+        known that I need not trouble you with it any further."</p>
+
+        <p>"I suppose you find the taste of your audiences has gone up
+        considerably within the last twenty years, do you not?"</p>
+
+        <p>"Why, yes," he replied. "They wouldn't stand to-day what they used
+        to roar at then. My music is quite elaborate compared with the two or
+        three chords which easily satisfied people in the sixties and early
+        seventies. Listen to this," continued my host, as he sat down to the
+        <i>piano</i> and struck a couple of very simple chords. Then he
+        glided softly into what he termed a modern accompaniment. It was all
+        the difference between "Ten Little Niggers" and a slumber song of
+        Schubert.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:60%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/073-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/073-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            MR. GROSSMITH'S HOUSE.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>"And do you find the public very critical?"</p>
+
+        <p>"Well," he replied, with a smile, "they are very kind. It is your
+        professional critic who is severe, though I can honestly say they
+        invariably treat me well. Criticism up to a certain point is good
+        enough. Beyond that point it is absolutely disabling to me. My father
+        was a very severe critic. When we went out together he used to take
+        the first half-hour, and then go to the back of the hall and
+        criticise me. But it so hampered me by causing me to think of and
+        consider every pose that I had to beg of him to desist. And then
+        again, as regards criticism, I always think&mdash;it may be very
+        conceited on my part&mdash;that I know a great deal more what the
+        public want than my critics do. I declare to you I should have to
+        take everything out of my sketches if I attempted to carry out all
+        the suggestions that are made to me. I can absolutely feel the public
+        pulse after so many years upon the platform. I am almost always
+        right. When I first started 'See me Dance the Polka' it fell quite
+        flat. I gave it up, although I felt sure it ought to go. The public
+        then demanded it, and it went with a swing. The public had changed
+        its mind. Not I."</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:60%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/074-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/074-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            THE DINING ROOM.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>"And how do you prepare your sketches?" said I, as Mr. Grossmith
+        lit another cigarette, and took up his position on the hearthrug
+        again.</p>
+
+        <p>"Anyhow and anywhere the idea comes to me for a sketch. I am
+        seated in a railway train, and I think of a sea-side sketch. I close
+        my eyes and try to recall every single feature of interest on a
+        crowded fashionable beach in the height of the season. Nothing is too
+        unimportant. The way in which an old lady settles herself comfortably
+        into her chair, the manner in which a man, especially a shy man,
+        walks into the room, all these things, slightly exaggerated, but
+        still true to nature, are immensely appreciated. First I have the
+        idea, then I elaborate, sometimes for months, then I produce on the
+        stage, and the people say, 'How remarkable it is you should invent
+        all this on the spur of the moment!' That, of course, is a great
+        compliment. The song-writing is always amusing," continued Mr.
+        Grossmith, as he placed in my hand a little notebook in which were
+        suggestions and elaborations innumerable. One thing I noticed, which
+        he himself had condemned, but which was decidedly amusing, although
+        it has never been allowed to see the light of day:</p>
+
+        <p class="figure" style="clear:both;"><a href=
+        "images/075-1.jpg"><img src="images/075-1.jpg" width="100%" alt=
+        "" /></a><br />
+        THE DRAWING-ROOM.</p>
+
+        <table class="poetry">
+            <tbody>
+                <tr>
+                    <td>"I've been engaged to many,<br />
+                    Quite a score of times at least;<br />
+                    I don't think I with safety <i>can say</i><br />
+                    Where I met my first <i>fianc&eacute;e</i>.<br />
+                    Oh! 'tis better to have loved and lost<br />
+                    Than never to have loved at all;<br />
+                    So I may say I have loved and <i>lost a lot</i>,<br />
+                    And my fickleness has <i>cost a lot</i>."<br /></td>
+                </tr>
+            </tbody>
+        </table>
+
+        <p>"Ah!" said Mr. Grossmith, as he leaned over me and saw what I was
+        reading; "my better judgment told me that was not good enough for the
+        public."</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:20%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/076-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/076-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a></p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:30%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/076-2.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/076-2.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "I ENCOURAGE HIM."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:40%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/076-3.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/076-3.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "I ATTEMPT TO LEAD HIM."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="clear:both;">
+            &nbsp;
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:30%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/076-4.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/076-4.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "I CARRY HIM."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:40%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/076-5.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/076-5.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "I LOSE ALL PATIENCE."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>Then came a pencilled note in this little book, "You can take a
+        horse to water, but can't make him drink." "That gave me an idea,"
+        cried Mr. Grossmith, as he sprang to his feet. "You can take a boy to
+        the piano, but you can't make him play.' Thought I to myself, that
+        would make a capital sketch. And here is how I set about it,"
+        continued he, as he proceeded to illustrate his remarks. "Imagine a
+        little fellow in the corner there. I then begin in dumb show to
+        encourage him to come to the piano. 'Come on, my boy; you know you
+        can play that pretty piece you played yesterday. Come on, there's a
+        good fellow!' Wonderful what you can do with persuasion! He refuses.
+        I attempt to lead him to the piano. He won't budge an inch. I carry
+        him under my arm and seat him in front of the instrument, the
+        audience roaring all the time. At last his mistakes are so many and
+        so ridiculous, I lose all patience and catch him a mighty box upon
+        the ears! Tableau!! Of course there is no boy on the platform at all,
+        I am quite alone, but I have so thoroughly lost myself in my
+        imagination that people have declared years after, 'Oh! but I am
+        quite sure you had a boy with you; why, don't you remember how you
+        boxed his ears?'"</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:30%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/077-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/077-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "HOW I DO IRVING."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>No less marvellous than his power of acting is his power of
+        mimicry. "I will show you how I do Irving," said he, and in a moment
+        the little man had ruffled his hair, had assumed to the life not only
+        Irving's peculiar gait, but, even more remarkable still, had managed
+        to secure almost exactly the very expression of the great tragedian's
+        face.</p>
+
+        <p>"Then again, I find it a good idea to take up some craze or topic
+        of the moment. 'The Drama on Crutches' I wrote when the craze first
+        arose amongst the aristocracy for going on the stage. One of the
+        sketches which you will find outlined in that little notebook is
+        entitled, 'Is Music a Failure?' and I endeavoured to answer the
+        question by showing how popular it is among all classes of the
+        community." I will quote pretty freely from this outlined sketch, as
+        it will give my readers an idea, better than anything else would do,
+        of the manner in which Mr. Grossmith prepares his delightful
+        sketches.</p>
+
+        <p>"I am not going to treat the subject seriously," he writes, "but
+        in my own particular, impertinent way. The question often
+        arises&mdash;are we a musical nation? The foreigners think we are
+        not. But where in the wide, wide world is there a country where you
+        will hear so many organs and German bands? Where is the country,
+        excepting ours, that can appreciate the concertina? Where, except in
+        England, can you hear that delightful combination of harp and cornet
+        outside a house of refreshment? The prejudice of other nations is
+        distressing; and as for their ignorance, why, I don't suppose Italy
+        and Germany have even heard of the ocarino and the Jew's harp."</p>
+
+        <p>And so the sketch runs on, until, in speaking of the universal
+        manner in which music is appreciated in England by all classes, Mr.
+        Grossmith goes on to say: "We have made rapid strides, so have our
+        servants. They don't know how to dust the piano, but they can play
+        it. Everybody plays the piano, from the Peerage to the School Board.
+        Then look how music has crept into our homes and social circles.
+        Besides the piano, the mother and daughters play the banjo, the son
+        plays the first fiddle, and the father the second fiddle&mdash;as
+        usual. I know of a Lord Mayor who plays the trombone, a clergyman who
+        plays the big drum&mdash;that's a nice unpretentious, giddy
+        instrument!&mdash;and I know of any number of members of Parliament
+        who blow their own trumpets!!" And so the notes go brightly on
+        through many pages.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:35%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/078-2.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/078-2.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            MR. WEEDON GROSSMITH.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:65%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/078-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/078-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            THE STUDY.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:35%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/080-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/080-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            MR. GEO. GROSSMITH, JUN.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:65%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/079-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/079-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            OLD ENGRAVINGS.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="clear:both;">
+            &nbsp;
+        </div>
+
+        <p>"This," explained my host, "is a fair specimen of the method I
+        employ in preparing a drawing-room sketch. As a rule, my audiences of
+        that class are capital. I always love a well-dressed audience, it is
+        so cheerful. You mayn't perhaps get as much applause as you do from
+        the sixpenny gallery, but then applause often spoils your point.
+        Once, however, I remember singing at a private house in the country
+        to an odd assortment of people. I was informed that the party
+        followed a wedding which had taken place in the morning. If it had
+        followed a funeral it could not have been more gloomy and depressed
+        than it was. I played the piano and the fool for three-quarters of an
+        hour, and anything more dismal than the result it would be impossible
+        to conceive. A temptation seized me suddenly, and I said: 'Ladies and
+        gentlemen,&mdash;I am going to reveal to you a secret. Pray don't let
+        it go any further. This is supposed to be a comic entertainment. I
+        don't expect you to laugh at it in the least; but if, during the next
+        sketch, you would only once oblige me with a society smile, it would
+        give me a great deal of encouragement.' The audience for a moment
+        were dumbfounded. They first began to titter, then to laugh, and
+        actually to roar, and for a time I could not proceed with the sketch.
+        They were transformed into a capital and enthusiastic audience, and
+        the hostess told me that both her guests and herself were most
+        grateful to me. I am sometimes amused with the little eccentricities
+        of people who wish to secure my services for their parties. A
+        gentleman once wrote to me to entertain some friends of his, and,
+        added he, 'I trust that your sketches are strictly <i>comme il
+        faut</i>, as I have several young daughters.' I was so immensely
+        tickled by this that, rightly or wrongly, I replied that my
+        entertainments <i>were</i> as they should be, for I was recently
+        married, and hoped myself to have several young daughters. He wrote
+        thanking me for this assurance, and I was to consider myself
+        accordingly engaged. There is a story I tell in my book which will
+        bear repetition: A young gentleman once called upon me. He explained
+        that he was acting as a sort of ambassador for a friend of his, Mrs.
+        &mdash;&mdash;, of Mayfair, who wished me to dine at her house. I
+        replied that I had not the honour of the lady's acquaintance, and,
+        though appreciating her kind invitation, I did not see how I could
+        very well avail myself of it. He said that Prince Somebody or other
+        and La Comtesse de So-and-so would be dining there, and Mrs.
+        &mdash;&mdash; would be so pleased if I would join the party, and
+        sing a little song after dinner. 'Oh,' I said, 'if Mrs.
+        &mdash;&mdash; wishes to engage me professionally, that is another
+        matter, and if I am at liberty, I will come with much pleasure.'
+        'Well,' said the ambassador, 'I fancy Mrs. &mdash;&mdash; is under
+        the impression that if she includes you in her dinner party it is an
+        understood thing that you sing afterwards.' 'I am afraid I do not
+        understand that,' I said. 'It would not pay me to do so. I only
+        consume about ten shillings worth of food and wine, and my terms are
+        more than that.' There," said Mr. Grossmith, "could you have believed
+        that anyone would have been so inconceivably mean and caddish?"</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/079-2.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/079-2.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            MR. GEORGE GROSSMITH.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/081-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/081-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "A FLASHY YOUNG CAD, IN A VERY LOUD SUIT."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>"I have had some curious experiences on tour," he went on. "That
+        is hard work, if you like. I have gone a four months' tour without
+        missing a night. It takes it out of one terribly. But it is very
+        paying work. In the South of England I have made as much as
+        &pound;300 a week. My friends tried to frighten me as to the apathy
+        of my Scotch audiences; as a matter of fact, I have no better
+        audiences anywhere. I like performing to country audiences. I am
+        never nervous as I am apt to be at St. James's, where there are a
+        number of my friends. And it is on my country tours that I have many
+        curious experiences. Amateurs invariably call at the hotel to see me,
+        and to ask my advice as to their powers of recitation. Some are quite
+        hopeless, and I haven't the heart to condemn them utterly, or to go
+        beyond 'I tell you quite candidly, since you ask me, that I have
+        heard better.' As a rule they are very quiet and modest, but now and
+        again one encounters some fearful specimens. I remember once at a
+        country town, which we will call Mudborough, a flashy young cad, in a
+        very loud suit, called to see me with a parcel under his arm. He had
+        come, he told me, to learn my opinion of his singing. He further
+        informed me that he was known as 'the Mudborough Grossmith.' He
+        didn't have the courtesy to take off his hat; he walked up and down
+        my room, whistling, singing, and handing me over now and again
+        specimens of his powers as a water-colour painter. I looked at them.
+        At last, tired of the idiot and his airs, I said, 'I hope your
+        musical sketches are better than you water-colour sketches.' Nothing,
+        however, could snub this fellow. He proceeded straightway to sing me
+        an improved version of 'See me Dance the Polka.' 'Do your audience
+        like it?' I asked. 'I should think they did,' he replied; 'I will let
+        you have that last verse if you like.' I thanked him sarcastically,
+        and at last he withdrew. I have, however, come across some real
+        talent in this way. For instance, that admirable actor and
+        entertainer, Eric Lewis, is a <i>prot&eacute;g&eacute;</i> of mine,
+        and you could not have a better man than he. Another amusing incident
+        occurred at Southsea. My secretary was in a shop one day, and he
+        overheard three ladies discussing the respective merits of Corney
+        Grain and myself. Two of them were for Corney Grain and one was for
+        me. Finding at last that the odds were too strong for her, she
+        departed with this final shot: 'Well, never mind, Mr. Corney Grain
+        can't jump on to a piano,' referring to my imitation of Minnie
+        Palmer."</p>
+
+        <p>Replying to a question I put to him as to his theatrical
+        experiences, Mr. Grossmith told me that it was in the November of
+        1877 that he received the following letter:&mdash;</p>
+
+        <blockquote>
+            <p>"Beefsteak Club,</p>
+
+            <p>"King William Street,</p>
+
+            <p>"Tuesday Night.</p>
+
+            <p>"Dear Mr. Grossmith,&mdash;Are you inclined to go on the stage
+            for a time? There is a part in the new piece I am doing with
+            Gilbert which I think you would play admirably. I can't find a
+            good man for it. Let me have a line, or come to Albert Mansions
+            to-morrow, after 4; or Thursday, before 2.30.</p>
+
+            <p>"Yours sincerely,</p>
+
+            <p>"ARTHUR SULLIVAN."</p>
+        </blockquote>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:49%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/082-1.jpg"><img width="100%"
+            src="images/082-1.jpg" alt="" /></a></p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:49%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/082-2.jpg"><img width="100%"
+            src="images/082-2.jpg" alt="" /></a></p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="clear:both;">
+            &nbsp;
+        </div>
+
+        <p>"This was a great moment in my life, although at the time my
+        father, whose good judgment I valued much, was of opinion that I was
+        not very successful as an actor. Sullivan, however, who had heard me
+        give a musical sketch at a dinner party, was of the contrary opinion,
+        and felt sure that I should suit him. It appears he and Arthur Cecil
+        were both writing letters at the Beefsteak, when the former said, 'I
+        can't find a fellow for this opera.' Cecil said, 'I wonder if
+        Grossmith&mdash;' Before he had finished the sentence, Arthur
+        Sullivan said, 'The very man!' And so I was engaged. I am much
+        indebted to these two Arthurs," continued the bright little man with
+        a laugh. "I reverence the very name of Arthur. I remember when
+        Gilbert wanted to engage me for the part of <i>John Wellington
+        Wells</i>, though I saw the part would suit me to perfection, I said
+        to him, 'I should have thought you required a fine man with a fine
+        voice for the part of a magician.' I can still see Gilbert's humorous
+        expression as he replied, 'That is just what we <i>don't</i> want.' I
+        played <i>Sir Joseph Porter</i> in 'Pinafore' every night for nearly
+        two years. Long runs don't affect the nerves of the actors nearly as
+        much as they affect the performance. Constant repetition begets
+        mechanism, and that is a terrible enemy to contend against. I make a
+        point of playing my best to a bad house; for it is a monstrous thing
+        to slur through one's work because the stalls are empty, and thereby
+        punish those who <i>have</i> come for the fault of those who <i>have
+        not</i>. Still, I repeat it, constant repetition is a dreadful thing.
+        Fancy playing 'Pinafore,' as I did, for 700 nights without missing a
+        single performance!"</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:49%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/083-1.jpg"><img width="100%"
+            src="images/083-1.jpg" alt="" /></a></p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:49%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/083-2.jpg"><img width="100%"
+            src="images/083-2.jpg" alt="" /></a></p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="clear:both;">
+            &nbsp;
+        </div>
+
+        <p>As he said this Mr. Grossmith led the way out of the room in which
+        we had been talking, and which he told me was his own special
+        sanctum, "into which no one is ever allowed to come except my wife,
+        for anyone rushing in here when I was composing or thinking out a
+        sketch would inevitably drive every single idea from my head," and we
+        went upstairs together. Here in the drawing-room he set himself down
+        to a spinet which bore the date of 1770, and he struck a few
+        exceedingly sweet-sounding, if slightly tinkling, chords from it.
+        "And this," said he, "is the oldest <i>Broadwood</i> in England. You
+        can see for yourself the date&mdash;1795." Downstairs he showed me a
+        beautiful model of a steam engine, upon which he was enabled to ride,
+        and which he could drive himself. "I thoroughly understand
+        locomotives," said he, as he pointed to a shelf full of all the works
+        upon the subject which he had been able to discover.</p>
+
+        <h2><a id="i13s8" name="i13s8"></a>A BLIND BEGGARMAN</h2>
+
+        <h3>BY FRANK MATHEW.</h3>
+
+        <h4>ILLUSTRATIONS BY F. PEGRAM.</h4>
+        <hr />
+
+        <table class="poetry">
+            <tbody>
+                <tr>
+                    <td>"Left dark among mine enemies."</td>
+                </tr>
+            </tbody>
+        </table>
+
+        <p>Long ago, the Fairies often stole children; they chose the
+        prettiest, and carried them to Fairyland&mdash;the Kingdom of
+        Tyrnanoge,&mdash;leaving hideous Changelings instead. In those days
+        no man had call to be ashamed of his offspring, since it a baby was
+        deformed or idiotic it was known to be a Changeling.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:50%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/085-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/085-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "THE PIG WAS A FRIENDLY ANIMAL."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>It is sixty years now since old Mike Lonergan, who lived in a
+        hovel in Moher Village, was robbed of his child. It was his wife
+        first found out the theft, for she had seen her unborn son in a
+        dream, and he was beautiful; so when she saw the sickly and ugly
+        baby, she knew that he was not hers, and that the Fairies had stolen
+        the child of her dream. Many advised her to roast the Changeling on
+        the turf-fire, but the White Witch of Moher said it would be safer to
+        leave him alone. So the child Andy grew up as a stranger in his
+        father's hovel and had a dreary time of it, he got little food and no
+        kindness. The Lonergans gave him neither offence nor welcome, hoping
+        that he might see fit to go home to Tyrnanoge and yet bear them no
+        grudge. He grew up an odd wizened little wretch, and everyone shunned
+        him. The children loathed him because they were afraid of him, so
+        they hooted him from a distance, or stoned him from behind walls.</p>
+
+        <p>Indeed, at this time his only ally was the pig that lived in one
+        corner of the hovel. The pig was a friendly animal, his front half
+        was a dull white and the other half black, and this gave him a homely
+        look as if he was sitting in his shirt-sleeves. Andy would shrink
+        into the corner, and sit cuddled there with one arm round the pig's
+        neck. Old Mike Lonergan took to drink, and spent every evening at the
+        Shebeen&mdash;small blame to him&mdash;for how could a man be
+        expected to stay at home with a Changeling sitting in a corner and
+        staring at him?</p>
+
+        <p>When the pig was driven to the Fair at Ennistimon, Andy was left
+        friendless, and then&mdash;in all winds and weather&mdash;was to be
+        found on the Cliffs of Moher. Sometimes he stopped out all night,
+        till hunger would bring him back when the Lonergans were rejoicing at
+        his disappearance. He knew every inch of the Cliffs, and spent half
+        his time lying on the edge of the grey precipice, looking down at the
+        sea, six hundred feet below, or watching the clouds of sea-birds; he
+        found new paths down the cliff-side and clambered like a goat; he
+        knew where the gulls nested, but never robbed them, and the caves
+        where the seals lived, and the seals shouldered their way through the
+        water close by him, looking at him with soft eyes.</p>
+
+        <p>When he was about fourteen, the Famine Year came; fever and "The
+        Hunger" swept Clare. The fever took Lonergan and his wife, and they
+        were buried in the dead-pit at Liscannor; it left Andy, but it left
+        him blind. Then the neighbours began to have their doubts whether he
+        was a Changeling after all; for the Fairies are faithful, and who
+        ever heard of a Changeling being left blind and penniless? If he was
+        only mortal he had been cruelly treated, so to make amends they gave
+        him the fiddle that had belonged to the "Dark" Man&mdash;that is the
+        blind man&mdash;of St. Bridget's Well, who had lately starved. There
+        was still a feeling that he was unfit for a Holy Well, so he took up
+        a post at the Liscannor Cross-roads, and there levied a toll on
+        passers with the professional heart-broken cry:</p>
+
+        <p>"Remember the Dark Man! For God's sake, remember the Dark
+        Man!"</p>
+        <hr />
+
+        <p>For nearly twenty years Andy haunted the Cross-roads, he came to
+        be honoured as one of the institutions of Moher, though the folk
+        considered there was much that was uncanny about him, he was so
+        silent, and he hated the smell of whisky. Now those were the times
+        when Cornelius Desmond ruled Moher in the old open-handed haphazard
+        way, never troubling penniless tenants. But "Corney" died and the
+        daisies grew over him, so the estate was managed by an agent who made
+        short work of paupers, and evicted "Dark" Andy from his ancestral
+        hovel. Andy did not seem to know his misfortune. He spent the day of
+        the eviction, as usual, at the Cross-roads, and came back at night to
+        a ruin. His neighbour, Larry Ronan the blacksmith, was grieved to see
+        that he took the change as a matter of course, and that after groping
+        in the four corners of the cabin he sat on the window-ledge as if
+        unaware that nothing was left of his home but the walls.</p>
+
+        <p>Next day it was rumoured that Bridget McCaura, of Moher Farm, had
+        sheltered Dark Andy. Bridget was a warm woman, a "woman of three
+        cows," a masterful old maid, who in her time had refused many a
+        pretty fellow, perhaps because she suspected them of hankering after
+        her live stock, her poultry, and her sixty acres of rocks. Then the
+        old parish priest, Father Peter Flannery, rode over to see her.
+        Bridget was called out of her house to speak to him; he was afraid to
+        dismount. She stood in the narrow gateway in front of her farm, with
+        her arms akimbo, ready to defend her home against all comers. Peter's
+        heart trembled; he has a great dread of angry women.</p>
+
+        <p>"Is it thrue?" he asked&mdash;and was so frightened that he looked
+        even sterner than usual&mdash;"is it thrue what I'm afther hearing,
+        Bridget McCaura, that ye've taken the Dark Man, Lonergan, to live
+        with ye&mdash;to live in the Farm?"</p>
+
+        <p>"Is it thrue? 'Tis so," said Bridget.</p>
+
+        <p>"But ye're not going to keep him, are ye now?"</p>
+
+        <p>"Keep him? I am that," said Bridget.</p>
+
+        <p>Peter screwed up his courage and told her warily, that though it
+        was well-meant of her, and "'tis you have the kind warm heart,
+        Bridget me dear," still, that propriety forbade it.</p>
+
+        <p>He was afraid to look at her as he spoke. Bridget was purple.</p>
+
+        <p>"What! a misfortnit ould omadhaun the likes of that?" she
+        cried.</p>
+
+        <p>"I know, I know," said Peter (this is a pet phrase of his and
+        usually means that he does not know). "I know, I know, but 'tis
+        because ye're a lone woman, tell me now are ye listening to me? If
+        ye'd been married now, 'twould have been another thing."</p>
+
+        <p>"Married!" cried Bridget with infinite scorn&mdash;"Married! If
+        that's all, I'll marry the craythur to-morrow!"</p>
+
+        <p>And so Dark Andy was married to the richest woman in Moher. He
+        seemed indifferent; as for Bridget, she had made up her mind to
+        shelter him, and there was an end of it, she took pleasure in
+        astounding her neighbours.</p>
+
+        <p class="figure" style="clear:both;"><a href=
+        "images/088-1.jpg"><img src="images/088-1.jpg" width="80%" alt=
+        "" /></a><br />
+        "I'LL MARRY THE CRAYTHUR TO-MORROW!"</p>
+
+        <p>There was never such excitement in Clare as when those banns were
+        read. Everyone saw that poor Bridget McCaura&mdash;"dacint
+        woman"&mdash;had been bewitched. All the old stories about Dark Andy
+        came to life, there was no room for doubt now, and the bravest
+        unbelievers trembled before him. There was many a woman would never
+        hear his name without crossing herself, and he got the credit of
+        every misfortune between Kilkee and Kinvarra, though some doubted
+        whether a blind man could have the Evil Eye. It was felt that he
+        should be asked to give up his post by the Cross-roads, since it was
+        inconvenient for the neighbours to have to climb two stone walls to
+        avoid passing him. However, no one could be found to suggest this to
+        him, so he still sat there daily, for he liked to feel that he was
+        earning his own livelihood.</p>
+        <hr />
+
+        <p>One rough afternoon during my first visit to Clare I was caught in
+        a storm of rain, and took refuge at the Liscannor Cross-roads under a
+        thick clump of trees that are stunted and bent eastward by cowering
+        from the sea-wind. As I reached them I heard a shrill cry, "Remember
+        the Dark Man!" Then I saw the blind beggarman sitting huddled in a
+        ragged great-coat so much too big for him that till he stood up I did
+        not see how tiny he was. He had a doleful peaked face, set in a shock
+        of grey hair. By him sat a little brown dog&mdash;the queerest of
+        mongrels&mdash;with a tin can tied round his neck.</p>
+
+        <p>Andy was friendly that day, and talked eagerly in a shrill,
+        stammering voice. I found later that he was wretched in still
+        weather, and loved the malicious rush of the rain; he was happiest
+        when the wind rattled in his ears and the rain whipped his face.
+        "Call that rain?" he said, "sure th' air is flooded, an' ye might as
+        well swim as walk."</p>
+
+        <p>Many times after that I went out of my way on my long solitary
+        walks to pass the Cross-roads, but as often as not he was glum and
+        silent, and then Bonaparte, sharing his mood, would growl like a
+        small thunderstorm. The seat was well chosen, for the cowering trees
+        are like a shed over it, and there is a pleasant landscape in front
+        (though that mattered little to Andy), a landscape of dim green
+        moors&mdash;with brown stains on them where sedge grows and black
+        shadows where bushes huddle in clefts&mdash;chequered by a grey net
+        of low walls, dotted with the white gables of cabins, and framed by a
+        wavering line of hills.</p>
+
+        <p>Sometimes I found him playing his fiddle to keep himself company,
+        but he stopped when he heard me, and, to tell the truth, I was glad
+        of it, for his playing was uncanny. Sometimes I met him shambling
+        along the brink of the Cliffs&mdash;a grotesque little figure, with
+        his old shapeless hat, his huge coat flapping behind him, and the
+        mighty blackthorn he carried&mdash;he knew the ground so well that he
+        walked as if he could see (indeed, he saw more than I could, for
+        while to me the breakers were only streaks of light, he spoke as if
+        he was close to them on the wet weedy rocks), or I came on him lying
+        by the edge, listening to the grumbling of the breakers and the cries
+        of the gulls.</p>
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/090-1.jpg"><img src=
+        "images/090-1.jpg" width="80%" alt="" /></a><br />
+        "LISTENING TO THE GRUMBLING OF THE BREAKERS AND THE CRIES OF THE
+        GULLS."</p>
+
+        <p>Mostly he was unsociable, he shrank from his neighbours because
+        they had been cruel to him when they were children, and the dislike
+        was more than returned; yet I think that, but for the loneliness of
+        his whole life, he would have been friendly enough. No one knew more
+        of folklore&mdash;I think he half believed that he was a Changeling,
+        and found comfort in the thought of that former life when he was one
+        of the merry "Little Good People"&mdash;and sure old Mike Lonergan
+        and his wife ought to have known best. He knew the ways of every
+        ghost in the county, and it was even said that he was on speaking
+        terms with the Headless Man who haunted Liscannor. Of course he knew
+        all about Fairies. When the fallen leaves scurried past his feet he
+        knew that the "Little Good People" were playing football, when the
+        wind whispered in the leaves overhead he heard them chatting, and
+        when it whined in the creaking bare branches, heard the poor little
+        folk crying with cold and bewailing the days when they found shelter
+        by snug firesides and sat there unseen but not unwelcome. Once,
+        before the world grew hard, they gathered in the cabins, and the
+        roughest fare grew pleasanter, the saddest hearts lighter, from their
+        good wishes; but no one cares for them now, and they cannot rest in
+        unfriendly houses.</p>
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/091-1.jpg"><img src=
+        "images/091-1.jpg" width="80%" alt="" /></a><br />
+        "HE WAS ON SPEAKING TERMS WITH THE HEADLESS MAN OF LISCANNOR."</p>
+
+        <p>As he grew older, he talked more of them, grew more moody and
+        restless, could not sit quiet while the wind was up, and spent night
+        after night out of doors. My friend Father Peter Flannery, who is my
+        chief authority for this history, told me that often, riding on his
+        sick calls in stormy weather, he met Andy staggering along the rough
+        roads.</p>
+
+        <p>Last year on November Eve&mdash;the night when the Fairies have
+        power, and the dead wake and dance reels with them&mdash;the blind
+        beggarman started out from the Farm. An Atlantic gale was shattering
+        seas against the Cliffs, the air was salt with foam, and throbbed
+        with the pulse of the breakers. Bridget tried in vain to stop him; he
+        said the "Little Good People" were calling him. She watched him
+        disappear into the darkness, the whimpering of his fiddle died into
+        the shrieks of the wind. "'Tis a quare divil, he is," she said, "God
+        help him!"</p>
+
+        <p>Once in the night she thought she heard a snatch of the "Fairies'
+        Reel"; but Andy never came back. Next morning they found Bonaparte
+        whining on the edge of the Cliffs; there was no sign of his master.
+        He must have gone over the Cliffs in the darkness, but the waves gave
+        no token.</p>
+
+        <p>Some folk in Moher believe that the Fairies took back their child,
+        and that the old blind fiddler lives now in the Kingdom of Tyrnanoge,
+        and makes music for their dances in that enchanted country where the
+        old grow young and the blind see. Some say that he still haunts the
+        Cross-roads, and only a week ago, Larry Ronan, coming back at night
+        from Ennistimon Fair, saw a black shadowy figure under the black
+        trees, and heard a heart-broken voice cry "Remember the Dark Man!"
+        Larry's natural surprise at this accounted for his being found next
+        morning asleep in the ditch. But it is agreed in Moher that Andy left
+        life on November Eve, whether he became the playfellow of the Fairies
+        or the plaything of the waves.</p>
+
+        <h2><a id="i13s9" name="i13s9"></a>CHURCH AND STAGE.</h2>
+
+        <h2>A REVIEW OF HENRY IRVING,</h2>
+
+        <h3>BY THE REV. DR. JOSEPH PARKER.</h3>
+
+        <h4>WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM F. BARNARD AND J. BERNARD PARTRIDGE.</h4>
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/093-1.jpg"><img src=
+        "images/093-1.jpg" width="80%" alt="" /></a><br />
+        MR. IRVING AS "HAMLET." (<i>From the Portrait by EDWIN
+        LONG.</i>)<br /><br /></p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/094-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/094-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            MR. IRVING AS "DIGBY GRANT" IN "TWO ROSES."</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>The innumerable reviews of Mr. Irving by literary and artistic
+        experts have left room enough for an amateur estimate by a man who is
+        accustomed to regard human life mainly from a religious standpoint. A
+        complete review of the Stage by the Pulpit could hardly be the work
+        of a single pen; for my own part, therefore, I can only make a very
+        small contribution to such a review by indicating a few points which
+        have occurred to me in the study of one particular actor. At once,
+        however, the question arises, Is Mr. Irving a man who can be thus
+        summarily characterised? In a dramatic sense, are there not many Mr.
+        Irvings? When a man can act "The Two Roses" and "The Dead Heart" with
+        equal effect, when he can at will be as vulgar as <i>Robert
+        Macaire</i>, or as dignified as <i>Cardinal Wolsey;</i> when he can
+        be either as young as Hamlet or as old as Lear, the inquiry as to his
+        plurality becomes natural and pertinent. For my part, I rank Mr.
+        Irving the comedian above Mr. Irving the tragedian, just as I rank
+        Nature above Art: each may be highest in its own way, yet the one may
+        have a charm which the other cannot boast. Mr. Irving's tragedy
+        sometimes requires working up, but his comedy is spontaneous and
+        immediate. The needful working up of tragedy is no fault of the
+        actor. Tragedy should hardly ever begin at once. The murder may come
+        too soon. Premature rage is followed by untimely laughter. <i>Digby
+        Grant</i> begins at once, and can be his best self in the very first
+        sentence, but <i>Macbeth</i> must move towards his passion by
+        finely-graded ascents. In Mr. Irving's exquisite representation,
+        <i>Macbeth's</i> anxieties and perturbations, his rapid alternations
+        of courage and cowardice, make delicate but obvious record of
+        themselves in deepening the grey of his hair, and ploughing more
+        deeply the lines of his face. A comedy may be judged scene by scene,
+        almost sentence by sentence, but a tragedy can be truly estimated
+        only when viewed in final perspective.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/095-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/095-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "A LITTLE CHEQUE." (MR. IRVING AS "DIGBY GRANT" IN "TWO
+            ROSES.")</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>Judged by this test, I have no hesitation in regarding Mr.
+        Irving's <i>King Lear</i> as the finest creation of his genius. This
+        is an instance in which the actor creates the piece. Shakespeare is,
+        as a poet and playwright, at his worst in "King Lear." Yet his
+        accessories are wonderful in variety and suggestiveness. Only
+        Shakespeare could have created the heath, and have so ordered the old
+        King's passion, as to make his madness part of the very thunder and
+        lightning. That was Shakespeare's magnificent conception, and Mr.
+        Irving's rendering is worthy of its tempestuous grandeur. How to talk
+        up to the storm, how to pierce the tumult with the cries of human
+        distress, how to escape the ridiculous and the incongruous, how to be
+        a King on the desolate heath, and to make the royalty gleam through
+        the angry darkness, were the problems, and Mr. Irving solved them one
+        and all, even with redundance of faculty and skill. At the end of the
+        heath scene the man is more remembered than the storm. It has been
+        objected that in the first scene Mr. Irving's <i>Lear</i> is too old
+        and feeble. I venture to think otherwise. I further venture to think
+        that the King's age and the King's imbecility have both been
+        accurately appreciated. A man at eighty, a man athirst for flattery,
+        a man who would pay a kingdom in exchange for adulation, must have
+        outlived all that is best and strongest in human nature. He comes
+        upon the stage as a wreck. His vanity has eaten up his sagacity, so
+        that she, <i>Goneril</i> or <i>Regan</i>, who can flatter most, can
+        lie most, and can play the devil best, shall fare most lavishly at
+        his hands. Is it not well partly to excuse these excesses of
+        self-valuation by such mitigations as can be found in the infirmity
+        of old age? Even in an elderly man they would have been treated with
+        contempt; they could only be endured in one whose eighty years had
+        been doubled by the hardness of his life lot.</p>
+
+        <p>In "Henry VIII." Mr. Irving had little to do. In that play the
+        labour and the glory fell upon another, to the infinite delight of
+        the public. In "Lear," Mr. Irving has everything to do. From
+        beginning to end there is only one character. Even the fascinating
+        <i>Cordelia</i> is but a silver cloud on the far horizon. "The King
+        is coming" is the cry of the play. His madness is more, as to display
+        and effect, than the sense of all the others. The scene is stiff and
+        cold until his wild hair is observed to approach the front, and then
+        the whole spectacle is alight with feeling and purpose. The other
+        actors are not to blame that, to a large extent, they are thrown into
+        the shade; indeed, they are to be warmly congratulated upon their
+        self-suppression and their passive sympathy. It is a hard task to
+        play the part of two heartless and treacherous daughters, and a
+        pitiful fate to have to represent the villainy of <i>Edmund</i>, yet
+        all this was admirably done. It cannot be an easy thing to come
+        forward to play the villain well, for the better the dramatic villain
+        is played the more is the actor compelled to recognise in his
+        execration the exact degree of his success. So admirably can Mr.
+        Irving himself play the villain, that it is difficult to believe that
+        any godparents ever, on his unconscious behalf, renounced the pomps
+        and vanities of this wicked world.</p>
+
+        <p>In many minor parts&mdash;or along the subsidiary lines of great
+        parts&mdash;Mr. Irving's subtlest power comes into effective play.
+        Who, for example, can be more gentle or more graceful with a little
+        child? Who could hug the "fool" more fondly than old <i>King
+        Lear</i>? Then recall his wonderful recognitions of old friends.
+        When, in "The Dead Heart," he is liberated from the Bastille, how old
+        times slowly but surely dawn into consciousness, and how quickly the
+        dawn hastens into the noontide of the tenderest fellowship and
+        highest festival of joy. It is verily a resurrection. After eighteen
+        years' entombment this political Lazarus comes forth to liberty, to
+        leadership, to dominance.</p>
+
+        <p>In "Lear," there are two wonderful instances of recognition, the
+        recognition of <i>Gloster</i> and of <i>Cordelia</i>. <i>Gloster</i>
+        is blind and bandaged. <i>Cordelia</i> has been long out of
+        sight&mdash;if not in actual days yet in depth of feeling&mdash;and
+        the King himself is demented. Little by little things shape
+        themselves in the memory and fancy of the King. There is something
+        confusedly familiar in the voice of <i>Gloster</i> which, tone by
+        tone, settles into recognition. In the case of <i>Cordelia</i> the
+        father gradually subdues the King, and instinct takes the place of
+        reason; then, in a fine strain, comes the identification:</p>
+
+        <table class="poetry">
+            <tbody>
+                <tr>
+                    <td>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; "Do not
+                    laugh at me,<br />
+                    For, as I am a man, I think this lady<br />
+                    To be my child Cordelia."<br /></td>
+                </tr>
+            </tbody>
+        </table>
+
+        <p>The utterance of these words by Mr. Irving is simply thrilling.
+        The tones, the glances, the approach, the embrace, lift up the words
+        into new light, keen and tender as the brightness of a summer
+        morning. The words themselves are by no means striking, are, indeed,
+        the merest commonplace, but, uttered with the natural pathos of a
+        consummate actor, they carry the play to its most subduing climax.
+        The humanity and the genius satisfy expectation in its most eager and
+        jealous temper. Failure at that point would have ruined the play.
+        Which was better, <i>Lear</i> or <i>Cordelia</i>, in that critical
+        action? We must first settle, Which is better, the star of morning or
+        the morning star?</p>
+        <hr style="clear:both;" />
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/097-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/097-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            MR. IRVING AS "KING LEAR." (FROM THE LYCEUM SOUVENIR.)</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>As I opened this brief review with a reference to the religious
+        standpoint, it may be well now to ask how the Church is to regard the
+        Stage as an educational institution? The Stage cannot be put down. It
+        responds to an instinct which is ineradicable, and which need not be
+        ignoble. The parables of the New Testament are the sublimest
+        recognition of that instinct. The drama is older than the theatre.
+        Much of the greatest preaching has been dramatic, by which I mean
+        that it has touched human life through the medium of story and
+        parable, coloured and toned by a living fancy. Sometimes, too truly,
+        the dramatic in preaching has degenerated into impossible anecdotes,
+        most of them originating in the Far West of America, yet even such
+        anecdotes testify to the overpowering force of the dramatic instincts
+        when limited to their most vulgar conditions. My submission is, that
+        a properly-conducted stage might be the most powerful ally of the
+        pulpit. I advance upon this submission, and contend that the function
+        of the preacher is infinitely superior to the function of the actor.
+        Whatever the preacher has to say that is distinctive he can trace to
+        what he believes to be a Divine and authoritative origin. I hold the
+        great preacher to be a spiritual medium. In his next evolution he
+        will simply tell the people whatever may have been given him in the
+        same hour to say. This does not mean that indolence will supersede
+        industry. Through the indolent man God sends no messages. The true
+        prophet will always be preparing himself. By learning, by meditation,
+        by self-discipline, the true prophet will prepare his heart for the
+        incoming of the Eternal Spirit, and the glory of Heaven will be as a
+        fire on the altar of the honest heart. Art preachers we have had in
+        too great abundance. Mechanical talkers have brought upon the pulpit
+        the disrepute of dulness. The age now waits for the messenger in
+        whose loving heart there is the glow and the radiance of divinest
+        sympathy. The great actor himself would be the first to admit that
+        the preacher cannot trace his own public secondariness to the poverty
+        of his themes. Where the preacher falls behind the actor, it is
+        because the preacher does not realise the majesty and the tenderness,
+        the vehemence and the urgency, of his own message.</p>
+
+        <h2><a id="i13s10" name="i13s10"></a>THAT BEAST BEAUTY.</h2>
+
+        <h3>BY KIRBY HARE.</h3>
+
+        <h4>ILLUSTRATIONS BY ERNEST M. JESSOP.</h4>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/099-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/099-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            A PROPER HOWL OF DISGUST.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:30%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/099-2.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/099-2.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            HIS MAIDEN AUNT.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>I was a man born to misfortune. In fact, my first misfortune, the
+        death of my father, happened three months before I came into the
+        world. When I did duly appear, and was giving a proper howl of
+        disgust, a fresh misfortune fell upon me; my mother departed to join
+        my father, leaving me in the lurch in a vale of unavailing tears. I
+        should have preferred going with my family to that blessed Utopia
+        where there are neither births, deaths, marriages, divorces, breaches
+        of promise, nor return tickets; only, unfortunately, I was not
+        invited. So I became a posthumous orphan, soothed by Daffy's elixir
+        and the skim-milk of human kindness. The milk was none too sweet,
+        human kindness did not spare the rod, and I firmly believe it was
+        Daffy's elixir that turned my hair red. However, I grew up at length
+        into stand-up collars and tail coats, and at the age of seventeen
+        springs was adopted (on trial) by a maiden aunt of seven-and-forty
+        autumns. Like a gleam of sunshine hope flashed into my loveless life,
+        lighting up my path to fortune. But it was only the glimmer of an
+        <i>ignis fatuus</i>, which led me into a quicksand and snuffed itself
+        out in a fog.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:30%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/100-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/100-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            ONE EVIL-MINDED BLACK TOM.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:30%; clear:right;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/100-2.jpg"><img width="100%"
+            src="images/100-2.jpg" alt="" /></a></p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>My relative had plenty of money, and plenty of other equally good
+        qualities in the long run, no doubt; but the period of my adoption
+        was too short to make sure of either the one or the other. If the
+        wealthy maiden was really a worthy soul she did not let her nephew
+        know it. Corporeally she was angular and iron-grey, with a summary
+        tongue and wintry temper, chastened by a fondness for feline
+        favourites. Unluckily, I was always falling foul of the latter, and
+        my aunt continually fell foul of me in consequence. Crabbed age and
+        youth could not live together in our case on account of cats. Age, as
+        represented by the mature virgin, adored the brutes; youth, in the
+        shape of a sprouting hobbledehoy, abhorred them altogether, and one
+        evil minded black Tom in particular. My aunt called him Beauty, in
+        happy ignorance that all her household called him a Beast. I admire
+        beauty in the abstract; I also like it in the concrete; and in the
+        concreted form of youthful feminine humanity I love it. But that
+        feline black Beauty was the most outrageous misnomer unhanged. I had
+        tried to hang him several times, down in the cellar in the dead of
+        night; but his patent cast-iron neck set suspensory science at
+        defiance, and Beauty triumphantly refused to give up the ghost. At
+        first, he kicked and fought against it lustily, and yelled murder
+        with all his might; but after a little practice the malefactor acted
+        more philosophically, regarding the performance quite as part of his
+        nocturnal programme. He never allowed it to make him late for
+        breakfast, nor take away his appetite. Each morning, after execution,
+        the moment the bell rang for prayers, in marched Beauty with a
+        swollen head well on one side, growling anathemas from somewhere
+        round the corner all prayer-time; after which the escaped convict
+        devoured breakfast with the voracity of a stiffnecked cannibal.</p>
+
+        <p>Finding the beast utterly unhangable, I determined to try
+        drowning. My nature is by no means a cruel one, quite the reverse;
+        but Beauty's cup of iniquity had long been full to the brim, and
+        running over into the saucer. He had gulped down my canaries like
+        pills, poached my pigeons, fricasseed my rabbits, and made himself an
+        abominable beast generally; and had now committed a crime that capped
+        everything.</p>
+
+        <p>My cock bantam, which had won first prize at the Slocum-Pogis
+        poultry show, mysteriously disappeared. Jim, the gardener's boy, and
+        I hunted everywhere without finding any trace till we sighted Beauty.
+        The beast was seated on my verbena bed, with fearfully distended
+        stomach, waving my poor little bantam's tail feathers from between
+        his teeth. Had I been an ancient Egyptian high priest, and Beauty at
+        the top of the tree of holy cats, his diabolical godship should have
+        been made into a mummy instanter. As things were, he had to be
+        drowned forthwith.</p>
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/101-1.jpg"><img src=
+        "images/101-1.jpg" width="60%" alt="" /></a><br />
+        AT A CABINET COUNCIL IN THE COAL CELLAR.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/102-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/102-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            IN THE DESERTED OLD MILL.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>At a cabinet council in the coal cellar, composed of the cook,
+        footman, Jim, and myself, all the executive details were arranged; my
+        aunt being, of course, kept in happy ignorance of our intentions. As
+        soon as my respected relative uttered the preliminary snore of her
+        afternoon siesta, Beauty made an involuntary exit out of the house,
+        all the lower doors and windows having been carefully fastened. Then
+        commenced a silent cat-hunt, a serio-comic drama in dumb show, with a
+        crowded audience breathlessly gazing from the windows. The scenery
+        was a series of dissolving views, beginning on a flower-decked lawn,
+        and ending at a mill-pool a mile or so away from the audience. Beauty
+        played leading actor with considerable activity, notwithstanding the
+        drawback of being handicapped with an undigested bantam. He flew over
+        dozens of flower-beds, through all the outhouses, over the stable,
+        out into the park, up and down all the tallest trees, and all over
+        the country, till he took refuge in the deserted old mill. There we
+        wriggled him into an ancient sack, and tied him up in the harmonious
+        company of a couple of brickbats. Then we committed the body to the
+        deep. The burial service was short, but hearty.
+        "One&mdash;two&mdash;three, and away!" sung out in unison, was the
+        special form for the occasion, accompanied by Beauty's farewell
+        blessing as we "awayed" him into the silent depths of the mill-dam.
+        There was a splash, a shrill cry from a frightened moorhen, a short
+        jubilate from Jim, to which I piously added "amen," and all was over.
+        Jim ran home with half-a-sovereign in his pocket, while I walked back
+        to dress for dinner. On the stairs I met my aunt, already in evening
+        array, and looking hungry. I knew the sign, and stealthily tried to
+        vanish, vainly.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:30%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/102-2.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/102-2.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            "LATE AGAIN, SAMUEL!"</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>"Late again, Samuel!" she remarked, with a freezing
+        spectacle-gleam that fixed me to the stair-carpet&mdash;my right foot
+        two steps above the left. "You have just come in, I suppose. Have you
+        seen Beauty?"</p>
+
+        <p>Horror! Could she suspect anything? I felt my face growing the
+        colour of my hair, and my tongue frozen solid.</p>
+
+        <p>"Can't you answer?" she went on wrathfully. "And can't you stand
+        up straight?"</p>
+
+        <p>I pulled my legs together and commenced to stammer.</p>
+
+        <p>"I&mdash;I saw Beauty out&mdash;outside, aunt, in the garden," I   managed
+        to mutter.</p>
+
+        <p>"Which way was he going?"</p>
+
+        <p>"Why, I think he was running towards the house, aunt."</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:40%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/103-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/103-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            THIRTY MILES AN HOUR.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>And then the remembrance of how he <i>was</i> running&mdash;thirty
+        miles an hour, with tail on end and ears flat to his head, with Jim
+        and my long-legged self racing in rear&mdash;made me choke with
+        laughter I was forced to swallow. But my aunt's eyes were on me, and
+        her gold-rimmed barnacles blazed through me, so I suffocated in
+        silence.</p>
+
+        <p>"Don't stand making faces like an idiot. Go and dress, and be
+        quick," snapped my loving relative, as she marched away downstairs
+        and I flew to the region above.</p>
+
+        <p>My bedroom door was partly open, and I dashed in hastily, pulling
+        off my things as I went.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:30%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/103-2.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/103-2.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            DRESSING FOR DINNER.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:40%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/104-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/104-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            A SHOW AT MUDDIFORD-ON-THE-OOZE.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>My evening clothes were laid out ready on the bed, and&mdash;what
+        was that on my shirt?&mdash;a black mass of&mdash;something
+        moving!&mdash;some animal! Why, heavens and earth, it was the ghost
+        of&mdash;that beast Beauty! It was Beauty himself! I ran for the
+        poker; Beauty rushed out of the door. Confound that rotten old
+        sack!</p>
+
+        <p>I was late for dinner, and found Beauty seated in my chair, sleek
+        and dry, with a ravenously whetted appetite. My aunt was so pleased
+        with her favourite's improved appearance that she became quite
+        affable, even to me. I was informed that as I had not been looking
+        well lately I might go for a few days' change to the seaside; the
+        salubrious air of Muddiford-on-the-Ooze would just suit me. What a
+        blessing! To have escaped from those ice-gleaming spectacles and from
+        that resuscitated beast Beauty I would gladly have gone to Jericho,
+        much more to Muddiford-on-the-Ooze. Then my aunt continued her course
+        of instructions, with the nearest approach to a smile I had ever seen
+        on her face.</p>
+
+        <p>"You will enjoy yourself, I am sure, Samuel, and you will also be
+        able to show what pains you can take to please me," she said, sipping
+        her first glass of Burgundy with approving relish. "There is to be a
+        show at Muddiford the day after to-morrow, at which I intend
+        exhibiting, and you will be able to manage everything for me; so mind
+        you are careful to do your best."</p>
+
+        <p>"I shall be most delighted," I declared gushingly. "What show is
+        it? And what can I have the pleasure of taking charge of for you, my
+        dear aunt?"</p>
+
+        <p>"It's the Grand All-England Cat Show, and you will take Beauty;
+        and I shall be greatly disappointed if you do not bring me back the
+        first prize. So be on your best behaviour, Samuel, or perhaps you may
+        live to regret it."</p>
+
+        <p>My jaw dropped, and I thought I should have slid under the table.
+        Good heavens! It was that beast Beauty who was to go for a holiday,
+        while I was to act as the infernal fiend's keeper! O my prophetic
+        soul&mdash;my aunt! But there was no help for it; I was bound in
+        bonds of gold.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:30%; clear:left;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/104-2.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/104-2.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            SEATED MYSELF ON THE HAMPER.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:30%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/105-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/105-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            LEAVING THE RAILWAY CARRIAGE.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:39%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/105-2.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/105-2.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            INTO ITS HADES-LIKE MOUTH.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="clear:left;">
+            &nbsp;
+        </div>
+
+        <p>On the following day, Beauty and I were duly driven to the
+        station, the former being luxuriously nested in a small hamper
+        specially furnished for the occasion. About half-way on the road,
+        just as we had mounted a long, steep hill, the cat managed to roll
+        his residence from the stern of the dog-cart and trundle himself
+        half-way home again. Luckily, he screeched blue murder at the tip-top
+        of his voice, or we might not have missed the beast. As it was, his
+        cyclical retrogression made us just too late for the train, and we
+        had to wait two hours for the next. So I seated myself on the
+        hamper&mdash;like Patience on the proverbial monument&mdash;and
+        beheld the coachman depart homewards, with a sympathetic hat-touching
+        salute, leaving me with a gloomy conviction of coming misfortune. The
+        train, when it did arrive, was tolerably empty, and I secured a
+        vacant first-class. For a time all went happily; then the cat
+        commenced groaning.</p>
+
+        <p>My aunt having solemnly ordered me to give the brute dinner, I now
+        prepared to stop his mouth with cold chicken. While I was cautiously
+        unfastening the hamper lid, Beauty remained quiet as a dormouse; and
+        then he proceeded personally to assist the unfastening, with a
+        vengeance. There was a bouncing volcanic eruption, a blood-curdling
+        howl, a mixed-up whirling round the carriage, and
+        then&mdash;smash!&mdash;bang through the window went
+        Beauty!&mdash;leaving me doubled up on the seat, holding out half a
+        chicken. It was a forty-feline-power hurricane, while it lasted; and
+        drops of perspiration trickled down my nose on to the chicken, at
+        which I sat stupidly staring. After a dazed pause I staggered to the
+        broken window and looked out. There was Beauty, with a perpendicular
+        tail like a young fir-tree, going like great guns in exactly the
+        wrong direction. We had just come through a long tunnel, and the last
+        I saw of my aunt's pet demon was as he dived headlong into its
+        Hades-like mouth. And I had to take home first prize for him from the
+        Grand All-England Cat Show!</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:25%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/105-3.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/105-3.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            INCIPIENT CATALEPSY.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:40%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/106-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/106-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            WASHING HIS FIENDISH FACE!</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>When the 4.40 down express arrived at Muddiford-on-the-Ooze
+        station, an auburn-haired youth limply emerged from a first-class
+        carriage. In his arms he bore a basket, and his grey-green eyes
+        gleamed with incipient catalepsy. Yes, such would undoubtedly have
+        been my description had I posed as the momentary hero of a penny
+        novelette. I forgot all about my luggage, imbecilely clinging to the
+        late habitation of the lost beast Beauty, wandering I knew not why
+        nor whither. Outside the station, round a quiet corner, my steps were
+        arrested by the surprising sight of&mdash;Beauty!&mdash;the very
+        identical devil himself! There stood the unhangable, undrownable,
+        hurricane-creating beast, looking as serene as a newly-born black
+        cherub, washing his fiendish face! I approached on tiptoe,
+        breathlessly, with the basket behind my back and the half chicken
+        extended as a peaceable card of introduction. He scented it
+        instantly&mdash;my aunt always keeping Beauty's tit-bits until
+        sufficiently gamey to suit his highly epicurean taste.</p>
+
+        <p>With a finishing toe-touch to his whiskers, he amicably trotted up
+        to me and&mdash;yes!&mdash;actually rubbed against my new trousers!
+        What could have happened to him! Had his run through the tunnel
+        turned him out virtuous? And how could he possibly have got here?
+        Experience has shown that a leopard can change his spots, and a negro
+        can grow spotted; but could a diabolical cat become even as a sucking
+        dove and fly over twelve miles all in the space of twenty minutes?
+        Impossible! So I put on a pair of folder-glasses and scrutinised this
+        new arrival doubtingly. No; it was <i>not</i> Beauty&mdash;not nearly
+        ugly enough. It was a twin, but larger, blacker, sleeker, a million
+        times more amiable, and very much fatter. Ah!&mdash;ha,
+        ha!&mdash;hurrah!&mdash;happy thought! Why not? I would. And,
+        thereupon, I instantly did it.</p>
+
+        <p>Placing the basket gently on the ground, I opened the lid and put
+        in the cold chicken, when lo! in jumped the amiable twin. Half an
+        hour later that basket, that heaven-descended twin, and that
+        successful chicken, were safely deposited in custody of the cat-show
+        steward, with the errant Beauty's entry ticket affixed. If the
+        steward had never seen the real original he would never discover the
+        difference; and if he did happen to be acquainted with the genuine
+        article he could but think that the beast was surprisingly improved,
+        and might even award it first prize for having turned over such a
+        notable new leaf. And for the same reason, my aunt ought to be highly
+        delighted at her favourite's favourable transformation. My heart was
+        lightened of its oppressive troubles, as my hands were free from
+        their feline load. With a hearty appetite I ate an excellent dinner
+        at the hotel, went to the theatre, and turned into bed thankful for
+        all fortune's favours.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:30%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/107-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/107-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            I ATE AN EXCELLENT DINNER.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>During the two following days, carefully steering clear of the
+        cat-show, I enjoyed my freedom gaily, and had&mdash;what our
+        three-thousand-miles-removed cousins would call&mdash;real good time.
+        On the third morning a letter arrived from my aunt, with an enclosure
+        which for the first moment I took to be a big cheque&mdash;a grateful
+        offering, as I hoped, for services skilfully performed. However, it
+        proved to be merely a second letter, in writing that was strange to
+        me, and which with some curiosity I proceeded to peruse. As I
+        unfolded the sheet, a vision suddenly crossed my mind of that savage
+        beast Beauty; a chilly shiver shot through my marrow, and I sent the
+        waiter for soda and brandy. It was an awful thought of what that
+        unkillable cat might do! There he was, rampaging over a civilised
+        country populated with children and lambs, and other unprotected
+        innocents, half mad, perhaps, with hunger, where neither canaries nor
+        pigeons, rabbits or cold chicken were grabbable. What desperate
+        murders he might commit! And should I be held responsible? Here the
+        timely arrival of the waiter helped to raise my spirits by a strong
+        dose of B. and S., and I began the enclosed letter.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:50%; clear:right;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/107-2.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/107-2.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            WHAT DESPERATE MURDERS HE MIGHT COMMIT!</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:50%;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/108-1.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/108-1.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            FOUR REMARKABLY FINE KITTENS.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>It was headed from the cat-show secretary's office. Why, of
+        course, that charming twin had got first prize, no doubt. Let us see.
+        "Dear Madam," so ran the official note, "I beg to call your attention
+        to what I imagine must, in some way, have been an oversight. Your
+        cat, described on the entrance form as 'a black male, named Beauty,'
+        which was, on the evening of its arrival, placed in the class
+        pertaining to the descriptive form, was found this morning to have
+        presented us with four remarkably fine kittens. This, of course,
+        necessitated the family's removal from the male cat class. I have
+        much pleasure in being able to inform you that both mother and
+        kittens are in the best of health, and will be carefully attended
+        upon. If you will kindly forward your instructions respecting their
+        disposal, I shall be greatly obliged." That was the note, and wildly
+        did the letters dance before my eyes.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:right; width:30%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/108-2.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/108-2.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            GASPING FOR BREATH.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>Having saved myself from fainting by finishing the B. and S., I
+        sat for some minutes gasping for breath. Then I rubbed my eyes and
+        reread that awful epistle. Yes&mdash;it was so&mdash;in solemn, sober
+        black ink! Beauty's twin had got four fine kittens! Great
+        Jehoshaphat! How could I ever get over those confounded kittens! It
+        was too late to murder them. And my aunt&mdash;but stop! Let me read
+        her letter; it might suggest something&mdash;some feline legerdemain
+        method of conjuring four fine kittens into a first prize black male
+        cat. So here goes. And this is how it went: "I always considered you
+        to be a fool, Samuel, but nothing worse, until now. Unless the
+        enclosed letter is immediately fully explained, and the matter set
+        right, I shall plainly let you know what I do think of you now, and
+        act accordingly. See the secretary, and telegraph me the result at
+        once." Not much hope in that, worse luck; only a limited respite.</p>
+
+        <div style="float:left; width:30%; clear:both;">
+            <p class="figure"><a href="images/108-3.jpg"><img src=
+            "images/108-3.jpg" width="100%" alt="" /></a><br />
+            WENT FISHING.</p>
+        </div>
+
+        <p>Away I went to the show, saw the secretary&mdash;from a safe
+        distance&mdash;and immediately telegraphed: "Have seen the secretary.
+        Hard at work setting matters right. Awfully sorry." Then I hired a
+        boat, and went fishing for the rest of the day. In the evening I
+        wired: "Beauty must have got changed. Cats now all going home. Found
+        clue and am following up. All right shortly." But my aunt's patience
+        had expired. Next morning came a curt note saying she would at once
+        join me, and either rescue Beauty or settle that secretary. How could
+        I ever face those searching spectacles! I fled. From a lonely spot on
+        the wilds of Dartmoor I wired: "Am following clue sharp. Getting
+        close up. Good news next time." Back came an answer: "Shall be with
+        you to-morrow at noon." At noon next day, I boarded the mail packet
+        Tongariro, bound from Plymouth to New Zealand.</p>
+
+        <p class="figure" style="clear:both;"><a href=
+        "images/109-1.jpg"><img src="images/109-1.jpg" width="30%" alt=
+        "" /></a><br />
+        OFF TO NEW ZEALAND.</p>
+
+        <h2><a id="i13s11" name="i13s11"></a>PEOPLE I HAVE NEVER MET</h2>
+
+        <h3>BY SCOTT RANKIN.</h3>
+
+        <h2>MRS. HUMPHRY WARD.</h2>
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/110-1.jpg"><img width="80%" src=
+        "images/110-1.jpg" alt="" /></a></p>
+
+        <blockquote><p>
+            "You can do nothing by despising the past and its products; you
+            also can do nothing by being too much afraid of them.... Be
+            content to be a new 'sect,' 'conventicle,' or what not, so long
+            as you feel that you are <i>something</i>, with a life and
+            purpose of its own, in this tangle of a world."&mdash;<i>Robert
+            Elsmere</i>.</p>
+        </blockquote>
+
+        <p class="figure"><a href="images/111-1.jpg"><img width="100%" src=
+        "images/111-1.jpg" alt="" /></a></p>
+
+        <h2><a name="i13s12"></a>THE IDLERS CLUB</h2>
+
+        <h2>Is Love a Practical Reality or a Pleasing Fiction?</h2>
+
+        <p class="sidenote">Mrs. Lynn Linton thinks there is no doubt as to
+        Love's reality.</p>
+
+        <p>Of the desperate reality of the passion there is no doubt; of the
+        intrinsic value of the thing beloved there may be many. The passion
+        for which men and women have died stands like a tower four-square to
+        all the winds of heaven; but how far that tower has been self-created
+        by fancy, and how much is objectively real, who is the wise man that
+        can determine? What is Love? We know nothing of its source. Sense and
+        sex cannot wholly explain its mystery, else would there be no
+        friendship left among us; and elective affinity is but a dainty
+        carving on the chancel stalls. The loveliness which makes that
+        special person the veritable Rose of the World to us exists but in
+        our imagination. It is no rose that we adore&mdash;only at the best a
+        bedeguar, of which the origin is a disagreeable little insect. We
+        believe in the exquisite harmony of those atoms which have arranged
+        themselves to form the thing we love. And we marry our human ideal,
+        expecting the unbroken continuance of that harmony. But the discord
+        comes; colours clash; the jarring note spoils the chord; the idol
+        once accepted as of gold and precious stones, proves to be only
+        common clay, thinly gilt. The diamonds are paste; the pearls are
+        beads of glass filled with shining fishes' scales; and the love which
+        we thought would be a practical reality for life, is nothing but a
+        pleasing fiction, good for its day, and now dead and done with. The
+        lover sees nothing as it is. Life is distorted between jealousy and
+        admiration, and the plain teaching of common-sense is as little
+        understood as the conditions of the fourth dimension or the poetic
+        aspirations of the Simian tongue. The adored is not a real person;
+        the happiness anticipated is not practical nor practicable. Both are
+        on all-fours with the substantiality of a cloud and the serviceable
+        roadway of a rainbow. Custom, familiarity, daily habits are the sole
+        tests by which the reality of the thing beloved can be
+        tried&mdash;the reality of the thing beloved and consequent validity
+        of love. Before these tests are applied, the whole affair is as a
+        fairy dream born of the perfume and the mystery of night. With the
+        clear cold breath of morning the dream vanishes, but&mdash;what is
+        left? The sigh of the vanishing god?&mdash;a tear on the cheek of
+        Psyche?&mdash;the loathing of the man who finds M&eacute;lusine a
+        serpent rather than a woman?&mdash;or the peaceful joy of the child
+        who dreams of angels and wakes in its mother's arms?&mdash;of those
+        who sleeping on the ocean wake to find themselves safe in port?</p>
+        <hr />
+
+        <p class="sidenote">"Rita" thinks Love is beautiful and wise.</p>
+
+        <p>At one period of life, love is simply an emotion&mdash;the outcome
+        of attraction, or the effect of that vague mystery which surrounds
+        sex. In this emotional stage the <i>feeling</i> may be real enough,
+        but the passion is an illusion. A girl is often more in love with
+        Love than with an actual lover. The youth who beholds his ideal in
+        the First Woman is in love with the woman herself who for the time
+        (usually very brief) embodies that ideal. But to the girl and the
+        youth comes an hour when they are humiliatingly conscious of study
+        wasted on a prettily-bound work of fiction that for all use and
+        purpose in life is quite valueless. The edifice of romance is
+        constructed much on the same plan as a child's castle of cards, and
+        deservedly shares the same fate. That is to say, the topmost card
+        overbalances the whole structure. It is usually the hand of Reason
+        that topples over Love's romantic tenement by crowning it with the
+        card of Common Sense. When we find Love has become a practical
+        reality, the discovery is often very unpleasant. We would rather not
+        be unhappy if we had the choice. Unfortunately, we haven't, and find
+        ourselves in that condition without exactly knowing how we drifted
+        into it. Drifters often discover Love to be a very practical reality,
+        because of unpleasant consequences. It is decidedly humiliating to
+        find ourselves in the toils of a siren the very reverse of our high
+        ideal of the personage who is to have the honour and glory of
+        subjugating us. This is one of Love's amusing little ways of proving
+        that ideals are really not important. The best and safest test of the
+        reality of Love is to ask yourself how much you have suffered on
+        account of it. I don't speak of such trifles as tears, heartaches,
+        sleepless nights, fevers of jealousy and despair, sacrifices, or
+        discomforts, but of <i>real</i> genuine self-torment and mental
+        torture which only this passion is capable of inflicting on its
+        victims. The most sceptical will acknowledge that its powers in this
+        line are only excelled by its apparent animosity. To discover the
+        life that completes and contents our own is not given to many of us
+        poor mortals. Here and there some fortunate individuals have made
+        that discovery&mdash;but they are rare&mdash;and not given to
+        boasting on the subject; yet though worldly wise folk scoff at love
+        as a myth, I question whether they could name any other passion of
+        the heart which has occupied so important a place in the world's
+        history, which has given life to all that is great and divine in art,
+        or inspired such deeds of heroism, self-sacrifice, and martyrdom.
+        Before its patient strength men have stood mute and wondering, and
+        proud heads have bent in reverence, and stern eyes grown dim. For
+        Love is beautiful, despite faults, and wise, despite follies. It
+        alone of all human emotions can lift our souls heavenwards, and make
+        even life's thorny path a thing of beauty.</p>
+        <hr />
+
+        <p class="sidenote">John Strange Winter's opinions.</p>
+
+        <p>Love may be classed under several heads. The first, the great, the
+        unattainable, the one-sided, and the worn-out. They are all real!
+        What can be more real than the perhaps not very practical passion
+        which first makes young hearts ache? What agony it is to <i>her</i>
+        when <i>he</i> dances three times running with that horrid, stuck-up
+        London girl, with her fashionable jargon, her languorous movements,
+        just a turn or two, and then stop for as many minutes! First love is
+        not often last love. <i>He</i> thinks <i>her</i> unreasonable to mind
+        those dances, yet when a great love comes into her life, making her
+        think of him as "just a boy," he suffers all, or nearly all, the
+        pangs of a great passion. Unavailing pain! <i>She</i> has cast the
+        die of her life, and past loves are shadows compared with the
+        absorbing power that now grips her heart like a vice. Much may happen
+        to the great love, but it is very real! A great love may merge into
+        matrimony, and life may run on oiled wheels, and Darby and Joan may
+        pass through the world, loving faithfully, and without digression, to
+        the end. Or something may come between, and the great love may become
+        the unattainable! It will not be the less real for that.</p>
+
+        <p class="sidenote">The Unattainable.</p>
+
+        <p>The unattainable has more in it of pathos than despair. Romance
+        sweetens it, and the romance never dies. The tenderness of "what
+        might have been" gives balm to many a suffering soul! The wife may be
+        unhappy, neglected, heartsick, she may even loathe him whose name she
+        bears, but she is often upholden by the thought that <i>he</i> would
+        have been wholly different! A husband may know that he has married
+        the wrong woman, yet he bears what is, because he cannot have
+        <i>her</i> who would have made life all sunshine. Few pity the
+        one-sided love, helpless, hopeless, and without justification as it
+        is; yet it is very real to the lonely soul. The worn-out love is the
+        very essence of sadness! It is heart-breaking to watch the efforts of
+        a foolish heart to keep a love dying or already dead, to see love,
+        which would once have made a paradise, poured out at the feet of one
+        who is only bored and not even touched by it. Nothing is so dead as a
+        dead love&mdash;yet, even <i>that</i> is real!</p>
+        <hr />
+
+        <p class="sidenote">Miss May Crommelin takes a professional view</p>
+
+        <p>Can any sensible novelist hesitate? Does a shoe-maker depreciate
+        leather? Would you saw off the tree-branch you sit on? Now, on this
+        subject, anybody's opinion (full-grown) is as good as another's. Let
+        the footman bring down word that love is the drawing-room topic, and
+        the cook will cry out, "What do they know more about it than
+        <i>us</i>?" Is it not a human feeling, call it instinct or no? Surely
+        old Sally Jones has simpler feelings than the Dowager Countess; as
+        much experience in this. Love is just as real as a rainbow on a wet
+        day; as&mdash;as influenza. The first may be a "pleysing payne": the
+        latter must be a very displeasing one. But there is little fiction
+        about either to the victims. Well, suppose love a mere brain-fantasm;
+        an odd survival when sensible folk have swept away beliefs in
+        witchcraft, fairies, and the virtue of fire and faggot for the wicked
+        ones who don't say their prayers the same way we do. <i>Still, was it
+        not worth while to have invented it?</i> However the idea was
+        evoluted, just consider the glamour it throws over thorns and
+        thistles, as we dig through life's long day of toil. As Trollope's
+        stout widow says, when choosing her second: "It's a whiff of the
+        rocks and the valleys." (So she had her marriage settlements tightly
+        drawn up, to enjoy her romance comfortably.) Consider this
+        epitaph&mdash;a real one&mdash;</p>
+
+        <table class="poetry">
+            <tbody>
+                <tr>
+                    <td>"Poorly lived, and poorly died;<br />
+                    Poorly buried, and <i>nobody cried</i>."<br /></td>
+                </tr>
+            </tbody>
+        </table>
+
+        <p>Broach this subject of love to a circle after dinner, round a good
+        fire. Everybody laughs! The young men and maidens look conscious.
+        What they feel is as real to them as pleasure in music they hear; in
+        the taste of wine. Yes, and far more&mdash;while it lasts. Some
+        elders profess scorn, because their minds are so choked with years'
+        dust of daily cares they have forgotten how they, too, once believed
+        love real&mdash;while it lasted! Ay! there's the rub. You are
+        told&mdash;truthfully&mdash;that love is strong as death:
+        inconstant as every breeze. Some declare, for them&mdash;</p>
+
+        <table class="poetry">
+            <tbody>
+                <tr>
+                    <td>"In the whole wide world there was but
+                    one."<br /></td>
+                </tr>
+            </tbody>
+        </table>
+
+        <p>Other as honest souls confess their hearts have known, since first
+        love, "many other lodgers." This seems clear, love is real to those
+        who <i>give it</i>! Only they who care more to <i>get it</i>, call it
+        moonshine and naughty names. Like figures on an Egyptian monument,
+        each follows one who looks at another. Never one scorned, but has
+        rejected a third.</p>
+
+        <table class="poetry">
+            <tbody>
+                <tr>
+                    <td>"As Pan loved Echo, Echo loved the satyr,<br />
+                    The satyr Lyda&mdash;and so the three went
+                    weeping."<br /></td>
+                </tr>
+            </tbody>
+        </table>
+        <hr />
+
+        <p class="sidenote">Miss Quiller Couch wishes Love were a pleasing
+        fiction.</p>
+
+        <p>"Pleasing fiction," forsooth; would that it were! It is a very
+        real game, and the rules thereof are practical. I know it, for verily
+        I myself have suffered. Let it not be understood, however, that it is
+        <i>as</i> a "practical, real lover" that I have suffered. Not at all.
+        It is that this order of beings walks abroad, and I am not of it, and
+        I meet it, and I am pained, and I feel sorry. Could Love be but a
+        pleasing fiction, how comfortable to sit aside and contemplate
+        it&mdash;a trifle to talk of, a dainty to dally with, a joy to the
+        juvenescent, a blessing to the book-writer, yet never an
+        inconvenience. But it is a practical reality, and it has great
+        effects. Why, I have seen good, healthy people, quite nice-tempered
+        people, brought to a shadow by it and churned into so many pounds of
+        incompetent irritability; <i>so</i> exacting about trifles, so
+        fidgetty about catching the mail, and so careless of the health of
+        the uninteresting majority. There was one man I knew down in a
+        village, and he fell in love with a pretty girl&mdash;they mostly do
+        that&mdash;but she would have nothing to say to him; and after every
+        rejected proposal he went straight home and made a three-legged stool
+        (he was a carpenter by trade, or perhaps it might have affected him
+        differently). He was what one might call an importunate man, for he
+        proposed nineteen times in all, and nineteen three-legged stools
+        stood as silent witnesses of his importunity. He changed houses after
+        the twelfth, for he found a sad joy in contemplating his handiwork as
+        he sat at his lonely meals, and his first sitting-room was only
+        twelve feet by eight. Finally, either because of his importunity, or
+        because she disliked the thought that the wordless witnesses might
+        fall into unsympathetic hands, the girl married the man, and scrubbed
+        the stools nicely with soap and sand, and grew quite fond of them.
+        And only once did she regret her surrender; and that was when it
+        flashed across her one day that twenty would have been a prettier
+        number: but she stifled that pain as years went on, and grew happy.
+        Then there was Dante's love for Beatrice, which caused him to sit
+        down and write such a lot. Most remarkable persons seem to have
+        produced something rather excellent as the outcome of their love. I
+        know a naturally lazy and slightly dingy boy who endured a nice clean
+        collar every day, and it cut his neck, and his soul abhorred it, for
+        he told me so; and he spent from seventy-five to ninety minutes over
+        his toilet every morning, while he loved, and he knew he could dress
+        in four minutes and a quarter, for he had done it often. Love was a
+        great beautifier. In this case I must admit that the lover suffered
+        more than we outsiders, except that he became irritable in his
+        cleanliness. Love should not be scorned, even if it is real and
+        sometimes uncomfortably practical. It is very beautiful, and lovers
+        make a pretty sight. What I protest is, that all creatures should be
+        lovers&mdash;or <i>none</i>. It is the half-and-half state of the
+        world which is irksome.</p>
+        <hr />
+
+        <p class="sidenote">Morley Roberts hopes Love will some day be a
+        pleasing reality</p>
+
+        <p>Ah, my gentle cocksure friends, how well you all know Love, and
+        how ready you are to say what it is, to cut it up, to carve it, to
+        classify it, and generally to spread it out. We live in a world of
+        lies, and conventions, the dead leavings of an ignorant past, bind us
+        still. Some day, perhaps, when men and women are free, Love will be a
+        pleasing reality. It can never be so in the majority of cases so long
+        as we play at make-believe, and teach nothing that we have learned.
+        The good man won't teach his sons; he leaves them to learn in the
+        gutter. The good woman keeps her daughters ignorant. As it stands it
+        is an evil to love anyone over-much. And when we love we love
+        over-much, for Love has been repressed till it has got savage in the
+        race. "La privation radicale d'une chose cr&eacute;e
+        l&eacute;xe&eacute;s." All the trouble comes from this&mdash;that we
+        men have partially created women. But Nature had something to do with
+        her compounding. That is, perhaps, a pity from the social point of
+        view. For Nature can't be nice and comfortable. She is only kind when
+        we go her way. Let us remember that Love is the foundation of the
+        world. The very protoplasmic cells from which we sprang could love.
+        The time will come, perhaps, when, having chipped away the lies and
+        faced the truth, we shall find reality a thousand times more pleasing
+        than any fiction. Love is something real and wonderful, and in a
+        natural world we shall have passed through the blood-splashed gates
+        of Passion and be calm. Now Love is tortured, for we love ignorantly.
+        We are like shipwrecked folk on some strange land&mdash;we know not
+        the fruits of the trees of it. We learn the poisons by experiment,
+        and we let others learn. This is Love the Fiction. But some day when
+        we awake we shall know what we now dream, and Love will be always the
+        most precious flower that grows in the garden of the soul. It has the
+        subtle fragrance of the heaven that is our own if we walk bravely in
+        the world, desiring truth. Under its influence we discover ourselves.
+        We build ships for new voyages, and burst into unknown waters with
+        our Viking shields of victory ablaze in the morning sun. The air is
+        sharp and keen, not foetid with poisonous lies; the waters are blue
+        and beautiful; there are shining shores about us, and marvels of a
+        new nature on every hand. We who were in the night, and of it, become
+        vivid with the sun. Our atheism banishes the worshipped gods of evil
+        that are no more extant in our dogmatic creed of joy. For Truth and
+        Beauty have guided us hand in hand, and all they ask of us is to
+        throw away the Law of Lies and to acknowledge that the two are
+        one.</p>
+        <hr />
+
+        <p class="sidenote">Zangwill reviews the evidence.</p>
+
+        <p>The traces left by Love in life are so numerous and diverse that I
+        am almost tempted to the hypothesis that it really exists. There
+        seems to be no other way of accounting for the facts. When you start
+        learning a new language you always find yourself confronted with the
+        verb "to love"&mdash;invariably the normal type of the first
+        conjugation. In every language on earth the student may be heard
+        declaring, with more zeal than discretion, that he and you and they
+        and every other person, singular or plural, have loved, and do love,
+        and will love. "To love" is the model verb; expressing the archetype
+        of activity. Once you can love grammatically there is a world of
+        things you may do without stumbling. For, strange to say, "to love,"
+        which in real life is associated with so much that is bizarre and
+        violent, is always "regular" in grammar, and this without barring
+        accidence of any kind. For ancient and modern tongues tell the same
+        tale&mdash;from Hebrew to street-Arabic, from Greek to the
+        elephantine language that was "made in Germany." Not only is "to
+        love" deficient in no language (as <i>home</i> is deficient in
+        French, and <i>Geist</i> in English), but it is never even
+        "defective." No mood or tense is ever wanting&mdash;a proof of how it
+        has been conjugated in every mood and tense of life, in association
+        with every variety of proper and improper noun, and every pronoun at
+        all personal. Not merely have people loved unconditionally in every
+        language, but there is none in which they would not have loved, or
+        might not have loved, had circumstances permitted; none in which they
+        have not been loved, or (for hope springs eternal in the human
+        breast) have been about to be loved. Even woman has an Active Voice
+        in the matter; indeed, "to love" is so perfect that, compared with
+        it, "to marry" is quite irregular. For, while "to love" is sufficient
+        for both sexes, directly you get to marriage you find in some
+        languages that division has crept in, and that there is one word for
+        the use of ladies and another for gentlemen only. Turning from the
+        evidence enshrined in language to the records of history, the same
+        truth meets us at any date we appoint. Everywhere "'Tis love that
+        makes the world go round," though more especially in ball-rooms. It
+        is awful to think what would have happened if Eve had not accepted
+        Adam. What could have attracted her if it was not love? Surely not
+        his money, nor his family. For these she couldn't have cared a
+        fig-leaf. Unfortunately, the daughters of Eve have not always taken
+        after their mother. The statistics of crime and insanity testify
+        eloquently to the reality of love, arithmetic teaching the same
+        lesson as history and grammar. Consider, too, the piles of love at
+        Mudie's! A million story-tellers in all periods and at all places
+        cannot have told all stories, though they have all, alas! told the
+        same story. They must have had mole-hills for their mountains, if not
+        straw for their bricks. There are those who, with Bacon, consider
+        love a variety of insanity; but it is more often merely a form of
+        misunderstanding. When the misunderstanding is mutual, it may even
+        lead to marriage. As a rule Beauty begets man's love, Power woman's.
+        At least, so women tell me. But then, I am not beautiful. It must be
+        said for the man that every lover is a species of Platonist&mdash;he
+        identifies the Beautiful with the Good and the True. The woman's
+        admiration has less of the ethical quality; she is dazzled, and too
+        often feels, "If he be but true to me, what care I how false he be."
+        The Romantic Love of the poets and novelists was of late birth; the
+        savage and many civilisations knew it not, and philosophers explain
+        that it could not be developed till Roman Law had developed the
+        conception of Marriage as a Contract. Even to this day it is as rare
+        as large paper editions of the books about it. Roughly speaking, I
+        should say it would spring up here and there among all classes of the
+        population, except poets and novelists. Romantic Love is the rose
+        Evolution has grown on earthly soil. <i>Floreat!</i></p>
+        <hr />
+
+        <p class="sidenote">Burgin thinks it all depends on the people who
+        love.</p>
+
+        <p>One morning the average man gets up, lights his pipe, roams round
+        his rooms in all the ease of unshaven countenance and
+        dressing-gown-clad form. Then he goes out, and meets <i>her</i>.
+        There may be a hundred women in the room, or park, or tennis ground,
+        wherever the tragedy (Love is a tragedy) commences. When the lights
+        are low he comes back, and is low also. Wonders how men can be such
+        brutes as to want dinner; thinks his life has been misspent; that he
+        is unworthy to touch her hand; that he has wallowed in the fleshpots,
+        and here is a way out of them. And if the man's nature be noble and
+        sweet and true; if he has hitherto drifted adown the stream of
+        circumstance because his fellows have also drifted; then, with the
+        deepening tides of his passion, the old spirit of knight-errantry
+        descends upon him with its mystic mantle of white samite. And slowly
+        out of this deepening torrent of bewildered impulse and devotion is
+        born a new man&mdash;a man with a soul&mdash;a man who can dare all
+        things, do all things, endure all things, for the sake of the woman
+        he loves. At the baptism of her touch he becomes whole, and shapes
+        his life to noble ends. Even if he can't marry her, he is the better
+        for his passion. Such a love endures until the leaves of the Judgment
+        Book unroll; for it laughs to scorn the pitiful fools who boast of
+        infidelity, the "male hogs in armour," as Kingsley calls them, who
+        look upon women as toys, the sport of an idle moment, rather than the
+        spiritual force which leavens the world, and makes it an endurable
+        and joyous dwelling-place.</p>
+
+        <p class="sidenote">And on the woman loved.</p>
+
+        <p>Of course, I was speaking of good women. I once heard a story
+        about a bad woman&mdash;a woman of the world, who was very much
+        amused at being taken seriously by a boy who loved her. "Tell me all
+        about it," she would say to him. "Explain what you feel, why you love
+        me, why you believe in me. Don't you see I'm courted and
+        admired&mdash;a social force&mdash;that men flock round me everywhere
+        I go?" "Oh, yes," said the boy, "I see all that. But you're an angel
+        of goodness, and can't help men liking you. If I lost faith in you,
+        I'd kill myself." "Ah," she rejoined, "that's what you all say. You
+        would doubt me, and live on." Then, one afternoon, he had good cause
+        to doubt, inasmuch as her engagement to another man was announced.
+        That evening she received a note from him: "Good-bye. If I lived on,
+        I might doubt; it's better to die and&mdash;believe!" They told her
+        of the&mdash;the accident that night, and she wrote a touching little
+        paragraph about it for the Society papers before dining out.</p>
+        <hr />
+
+        <p class="sidenote">Gribble generaliseth confidently.</p>
+
+        <p>In a sense, of course, Love is necessarily a fiction, whether
+        pleasing or otherwise; for illusion is of the essence of it. The
+        lover, in fact, is like the artist who sees things through a
+        temperament, and, by eliminating the irrelevant, builds up the ideal
+        on the foundation of the real. Tityrus sees more in Amaryllis than
+        his brother shepherds see, just as Mr. Whistler sees more in a
+        November fog than is visible to the eye of the casual wayfarer who
+        gets lost in it, and mingles profanity with his coughs, yet, granting
+        this, the reality and completeness of the illusion does not admit of
+        doubt. On no alternative hypothesis can the great majority of
+        marriages be explained. If commonplace people saw each other as
+        others see them, surely they would remain single all their lives. Yet
+        most people are commonplace, and most people marry. The
+        reality&mdash;the controlling over-mastering reality&mdash;of Love
+        has to be assumed to make their behaviour intelligible.</p>
+
+        <p class="sidenote">Having hasted from a wedding for the purpose.</p>
+
+        <p>This point struck me forcibly the last time I was present at a
+        wedding. It was a Jewish wedding, celebrated at the little synagogue
+        behind the Haymarket. I had no acquaintance with anyone concerned in
+        the ceremony, but had dropped in quite casually, having heard that
+        Jewish weddings were picturesque. The one thing that impressed me
+        more than anything else was the decided undesirability of both the
+        bridegroom and the bride. That the bride was not comely goes for
+        little. But her forehead indicated a limited range and low ideals;
+        the corners of her mouth spoke of an irritable temper; her bearing
+        was vulgar; her voice had a twang that made one long to take her by
+        the shoulders and shake her violently. She was also escorted by gaudy
+        female relatives, by looking at whom one could anticipate the awful
+        possibilities of her maturity. As for the bridegroom, he was a Hebrew
+        of the florid type. His waistcoat was protuberant; he had a red face
+        with red whiskers sprawling all over it; he wore flash jewellery; his
+        hair shone with pomatum; there was that in his bearing which
+        indicated that he followed some sordid calling, such as pawnbroking,
+        or the backing of horses on commission. Yet one could see that these
+        two unattractive persons were really attracted by each other. A great
+        and beautiful miracle had been performed; and the power which had
+        performed it was that Love in which some profess to disbelieve.</p>
+        <hr />
+
+        <p class="sidenote">Frank Mathew displays his Ignorance.</p>
+
+        <p>Ignorance&mdash;says some wiseacre&mdash;is the mother of
+        eloquence, and I take it that the less one knows of Love the easier
+        it is to write of it. I side with those who hold that the Love
+        described by poets and other wordy people is mainly fanciful, a
+        flattering picture, that the best school for such writing is an
+        unhappy affection, and that no man can want better luck than to have
+        his heart broken, and so be made proof against lovesickness. An
+        unrequited love runs no risk of being dulled by the prose of life. A
+        man so fortunate as to be jilted or rejected finds his Beloved
+        remaining beautiful and young to him when her husband sees her an
+        unwieldy and wearisome old woman. And when at times he grows
+        sentimental&mdash;a bachelor's privilege&mdash;he can feel again the
+        old hopes that he never found false, and see the old perfections that
+        were never disproved. He has a life-companion who comes only when she
+        is wanted, and then with a "smile on her face and a rose in her
+        hair," whose voice is always gentle, to whom wrinkles are not
+        necessary and bills are not known.</p>
+
+        <p class="sidenote">And praises ugliness.</p>
+
+        <p>I am one of those who prefer the luckless adorers in novels to the
+        conquering heroes; and hold that the quality an ideal lover needs
+        most is ugliness, so that he may honour beauty the more. Once I knew
+        a boy who was uglier than sin, and who wrote a story&mdash;in a
+        sprawling hand and on ruled paper&mdash;a wonderful story, telling
+        how an unlovely but admirable Knight, worshipping a Princess, rode
+        out to win her by great deeds, and how when he came back triumphant,
+        the sight of her brought his unworthiness home to him so that he
+        dared not claim her. And I knew another boy who was good-looking, and
+        wrote a story (during study-time, of course, and by stealth) about a
+        handsome hero who went to Court in fine clothes, and was worshipped
+        by all the girls. I think now that he was the manlier, but that the
+        first would have made the more devout lover. But the drawback of
+        luckless adorers is that their constancy has not been tried by the
+        ordeal of success. Many a fellow who lived loyal and heart-broken
+        would have made an unfaithful husband.</p>
+        <hr />
+
+        <p class="sidenote">'Q.' is surprised at his sister.</p>
+
+        <p>Love, no doubt, is a subject of popular interest, but a man is
+        always staggered to find his sister holding an opinion upon it. If I
+        remember rightly, in the days when Lilian Quiller Couch (then aged
+        seven) did me the honour of playing Juliet to my Romeo, the interest
+        was mainly acrobatic, Romeo descending the gardener's ladder
+        head-foremost, while Juliet tilted her body as far over the nursery
+        window-sill as she could manage without breaking her neck. We "cut"
+        the love speeches. Two years later, indeed, my sister schemed to
+        marry me to our common governess. There was no love on my side; so
+        she turned over the Prayer-book, hoping to find "A man may not marry
+        his governess" in the table of Forbidden Degrees. Such a prohibition
+        (she well knew) would be a trumpet-call to my native spirit of
+        disobedience. But I am convinced that even then the nature of true
+        affection did not enter into her calculations. She merely counted on
+        my marital influence to end or mend the French irregular verbs. I am
+        delighted that, in these later days, she sees Love to be a "practical
+        reality." For my part, I want a definition. Popular custom bestows
+        the name of Love on a green sickness which is in fact a part of
+        Nature's wise economy. I will expound. Almost all young men, say
+        between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, incline to consume much
+        meat and do next to no work. Were there no corrective, it is clear
+        that in a few years the face of the earth would be eaten bare as by
+        locusts. But at this season Nature by the simplest stroke&mdash;the
+        flush of a commonplace cheek, the warm touch of a commonplace
+        hand&mdash;in a twinkling redresses the balance. Forthwith the ideal
+        devourer of crops and herbs not only loses his appetite, but arising,
+        smacks the earth with a hoe till the clods fly and the fields laugh
+        with harvest. Thereon he mops his steaming brow, bedecks him with a
+        bunch of white ribbons, and jogs jovially to church arm in arm with
+        the pretty cause of all this beneficent disturbance. And the
+        spectacle is mighty taking and commendable; but you'll excuse me for
+        holding that it is not Love. It bears about the same relation to Love
+        that Bumble-puppy bears to good whist. Among the eccentricities that
+        make up the Average Man I find none more diverting than his
+        complacent belief that he is, or has been, or will certainly some day
+        be, in love. As a matter of fact, the capacity to love belongs to one
+        man or woman in ten thousand. Listen to Matthew Arnold:</p>
+
+        <table class="poetry">
+            <tbody>
+                <tr>
+                    <td>"But in the world I learnt, what there<br />
+                    &nbsp;&nbsp; Thou wilt too surely one day prove,<br />
+                    That will, that energy, though rare,<br />
+                    &nbsp;&nbsp; Are yet far, far less rare than
+                    love."<br /></td>
+                </tr>
+            </tbody>
+        </table>
+
+        <p>I go further and believe it rarer even than Genius. Indeed, the
+        capacity to love, is a specialised form of genius. You understand
+        that I am not commending it. Its possessors are often disreputable
+        and almost always unhappy. Their recompense is that they, and they
+        only, have seen the splendours of the passion, and vibrated to the
+        shaking inner music of the sheep-boy's pipe.</p>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12223 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/12223-h/images/001-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/001-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fdf3897
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/001-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/005-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/005-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6ecc113
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/005-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/006-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/006-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..789a2cc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/006-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/006-2.jpg b/12223-h/images/006-2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cc59ae2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/006-2.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/007-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/007-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2d28791
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/007-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/008-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/008-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7820c23
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/008-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/009-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/009-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a1435db
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/009-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/011-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/011-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5616197
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/011-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/012-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/012-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b4bf51f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/012-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/013-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/013-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ddf4245
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/013-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/015-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/015-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..909127c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/015-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/016-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/016-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4f36d6a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/016-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/017-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/017-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..47ba2ef
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/017-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/019-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/019-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d50b3b6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/019-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/021-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/021-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cf36c4a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/021-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/022-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/022-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..51ba1db
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/022-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/023-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/023-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4721d65
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/023-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/024-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/024-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d8e4d32
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/024-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/025-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/025-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3ee3026
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/025-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/026-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/026-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..70ad4c8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/026-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/027-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/027-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f6e0936
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/027-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/028-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/028-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..81cccab
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/028-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/029-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/029-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bcd69c7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/029-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/030-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/030-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..56c5f36
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/030-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/031-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/031-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d8c265f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/031-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/032-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/032-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a9e95bb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/032-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/033-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/033-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e5032a9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/033-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/034-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/034-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ea37e2b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/034-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/035-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/035-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..319cb60
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/035-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/037-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/037-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..31638b7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/037-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/038-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/038-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e712ff8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/038-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/039-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/039-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..67d7d74
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/039-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/040-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/040-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..da5eb65
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/040-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/041-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/041-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c1189ea
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/041-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/043-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/043-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..51bc5b9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/043-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/044-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/044-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a5fd3fc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/044-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/045-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/045-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1a01dc4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/045-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/046-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/046-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1ff7650
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/046-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/047-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/047-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..df2cb45
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/047-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/048-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/048-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5175212
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/048-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/049-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/049-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fb25701
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/049-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/050-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/050-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4ff786d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/050-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/051-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/051-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..948ecb9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/051-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/053-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/053-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..718a896
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/053-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/054-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/054-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3268e3a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/054-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/056-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/056-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d93dfc9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/056-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/058-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/058-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..85a82cc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/058-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/060-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/060-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..062af12
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/060-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/062-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/062-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..16ada2f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/062-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/063-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/063-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cdb47c3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/063-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/064-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/064-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b615020
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/064-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/065-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/065-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..53bfd78
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/065-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/066-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/066-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..09b3c9d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/066-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/068-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/068-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..04325d0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/068-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/069-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/069-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..52f6e2f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/069-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/070-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/070-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4dc09bb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/070-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/071-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/071-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6af37b8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/071-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/072-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/072-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..26dd0bb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/072-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/073-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/073-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3270cca
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/073-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/074-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/074-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c2cd810
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/074-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/075-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/075-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5eee765
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/075-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/076-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/076-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0daaa1c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/076-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/076-2.jpg b/12223-h/images/076-2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..baf67c0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/076-2.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/076-3.jpg b/12223-h/images/076-3.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d06d09f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/076-3.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/076-4.jpg b/12223-h/images/076-4.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1dbf541
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/076-4.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/076-5.jpg b/12223-h/images/076-5.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a69cf35
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/076-5.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/077-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/077-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5f87aa6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/077-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/078-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/078-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f181461
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/078-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/078-2.jpg b/12223-h/images/078-2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6db766e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/078-2.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/079-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/079-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b938b6f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/079-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/079-2.jpg b/12223-h/images/079-2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fa2d90b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/079-2.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/080-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/080-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bf9269a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/080-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/081-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/081-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..951ccea
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/081-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/082-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/082-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d3cc3d7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/082-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/082-2.jpg b/12223-h/images/082-2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0d21f2f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/082-2.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/083-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/083-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e2554f2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/083-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/083-2.jpg b/12223-h/images/083-2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d48b7f3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/083-2.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/085-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/085-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a688531
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/085-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/088-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/088-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..698f8c9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/088-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/090-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/090-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..808340c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/090-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/091-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/091-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3d53caa
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/091-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/093-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/093-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..88a46c2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/093-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/094-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/094-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0ba40d6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/094-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/095-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/095-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..82a5d7f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/095-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/097-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/097-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0a1a202
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/097-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/099-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/099-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..15c5459
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/099-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/099-2.jpg b/12223-h/images/099-2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6a1141d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/099-2.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/100-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/100-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d77bee8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/100-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/100-2.jpg b/12223-h/images/100-2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9e12dff
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/100-2.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/101-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/101-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..27ce9d8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/101-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/102-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/102-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dbe1de4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/102-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/102-2.jpg b/12223-h/images/102-2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..821dbcf
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/102-2.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/103-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/103-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c443069
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/103-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/103-2.jpg b/12223-h/images/103-2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..65c794e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/103-2.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/104-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/104-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..925b8d6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/104-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/104-2.jpg b/12223-h/images/104-2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..69eaece
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/104-2.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/105-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/105-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b513473
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/105-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/105-2.jpg b/12223-h/images/105-2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..337a401
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/105-2.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/105-3.jpg b/12223-h/images/105-3.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..74109b7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/105-3.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/106-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/106-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..956c316
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/106-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/107-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/107-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7187196
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/107-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/107-2.jpg b/12223-h/images/107-2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7a0ca63
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/107-2.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/108-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/108-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0d1f7e3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/108-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/108-2.jpg b/12223-h/images/108-2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..71ac176
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/108-2.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/108-3.jpg b/12223-h/images/108-3.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1ba07f0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/108-3.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/109-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/109-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..066d0ef
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/109-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/110-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/110-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..239f096
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/110-1.jpg
diff --git a/12223-h/images/111-1.jpg b/12223-h/images/111-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..03dd95e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12223-h/images/111-1.jpg