Philistia

n-the-Sea, is one of the prettiest and quietest little out-of-the-way wa

e of bathing-machines and the decent covering of an approved costume, between the hours of eight and eight. A board beside the mouth of the harbour, signed by a Secretary of State to his late Majesty King William the Fourth, still announces to a heedless world the tolls to be paid for entry by the ships that never arrive; and a superannuated official in a wooden leg and a gold cap-band retains the honourable sinecure of a harbour-mastership, with a hypothetical salary nominally payable from the non-existent fees and port dues. The little river Cale, at the bottom of whose combe the wee town nestles snugly, has cut itself

er six miles, with red hot drag creaking and groaning lugubriously, till it seems to topple over sheer into the sea at the clambering High Street of the old borough. As you turn to descend the seaward slope at the Cross Foxes, you appear to leave modern industrial England and the nineteenth century well behind you on the north, and you go down into a little isolated primaeval dale, cut off from all the outer world by the high ridge that girds it round on every side, and turned only on the southern front towards the open Channel and the backing sun. Half-way down the steep cobble-paved High St

unds of best black tea, and mind you don't send it all dust, as you usually do. No good tea to be got nowadays, since they took the duties off and ruined the country. And I see a tall young man lounging about the place sometimes, and never touching his ha

home from Oxford at present for his vacations, and he isn't in the fish-curing line at all, ma'am, but he's a Fellow of his college, as I've

igorously at their proper level she always made a feint of forgetting any steps in advance which they might have been bold enough to take, without humbly obtaining her previous permission, out of their original and natural obscurity. 'Fellow of his college is he, really? Fellow of a college! Dear me, how completely Oxford is going to the dogs. Admitting all kinds of od

d now he's got a Fellowship at Oriel. You must mind hearing all about it at the time, only you're getting so forgetful like now, with years and such like.' Mrs. Oswald knew t

now, with a nomination no doubt; and there, I dare say, he attracted some attention, being a decent, hard-working lad, and got sent to Oxford with a sizarship, or something of the sort; there are all kinds of arrange

en no more beholden to patronage, ma'am, than your brother the Archdeacon was, nor for the matter o' that not so much neither; for I've a'ways understood the old Squire sent him first to the Charterhouse, and afterwards he got a living through Lord Modbury's

s estate, nor don't want to be. There's Mrs. Figgins, now, the baker's wife; her daughter has just chosen to get married to a bank clerk in London; and I said to her this morning, "Well, Mrs. Figgins, so you've let your Polly go and pick up with some young fellow from town that you've never seen before, haven't you? And that's the way of all you people. You marry your girls to bank clerks without a reference, for the sake of getting 'em off yo

ss Luttrell, but her n

it

ness. But these young ladies of the new style must be Ediths and Eleanors and Ophelias, and all that heathenish kind of thing, as if they were princesses of the blo

ttrell, leastways not so far as I know of; but she's going

e her own rank and place in society at Oxford. Tell her so from me, Mrs. Oswald, and mind you don't send the tea dusty. Two pounds of your best, if you please, as soon as you can send it. Good-morning.' And Miss Luttrell, having discovered the absolute truth of the s

behind his biscuit-boxes. 'Must have heard it from the Rector's wife, and wanted to find

op, Harry and Edie Oswald were busily discussing the necessary

'You'll want a decent dinner dress, of course, for you'll be asked out to dine at l

f and a locket, it does really very nicely. Then I've got three afternoon dresses, the grey you gave me, the sage-greeny aesthetic one, and the peacock-blue with the satin box-pleats. It's a charming dress, the peac

'm afraid I'm a very poor critic in that matter-if you were only a problem in space of four dimensions, now! Yet, afte

elled that she might have looked tall if she stood alone at a little distance. She never walked, but seemed to dance about from place to place, so buoyant and light, that Harry doubted whether in her case gravitation could really vary as the square of the distance-it seemed, in fact, to be almost diminished in the proportions of the cube. Her hair and eyes-such big bright eyes!-were dark; but her complexion was scarcely brunette, and the colour in her cheeks was rich and peach-like, after the true Devonian type. She was dimpled whenever she smiled, and she smil

foot with a smile of satisfaction which made her blush deepen; '

ut I took the notion of the bodice partly too from t

ophile Gautier says the one great advantage which a beautiful woman possesses over a beautiful statue is this, that while a man has to walk round the beautifu

body but my brother quoted such a thing as that

should have quoted him to you. But if there is any statue on earth prettier or more graceful than you are in that dress at t

ngs you must be capable of saying to somebody else's s

e justice to observe that if I had described a circle round you, instead of allowing you to revolve once on your own axis, I shouldn't have been able to get the

out of doors, on a fine afternoon, when the light is falling slantwise, you know, just as it

retty,' Harry went on,

t was a serious piece

at?' asked E

urkey-cocks, because they were great conquerors and all that sort of thing; and it was their Nemesis to get murdered by Clytemnestra, or jolly well beaten by the Athenians at Salamis. Well, Le Breton always uses the word for anything that he thinks socially wrong-and he thinks a good many things socially wrong, I can tell you-anything that partakes of the nature of a class distinction, or a mere vulgar o

ton-the elder or

low of St. Aldate's, he's not troubled with any

in for their degr

ship; Ernest's up in residence

think my dress a piece o

, Er

upon every woman's natural right to wear the dress

very good fellow; and of one thing I'm certain, w

to wear a new peacock-blue camel-hair

g there so pretty in that pretty dress, I feel inclined to say to myself, "Every woman ought to do her best to make herself look as beautiful as she can for the common

. You're in your polites

me over to the other side. He has the enthusiasm of humanity so strong upo

ock-blue, for fear of hubris and Nemesis and so forth, and go

thers. You must remember, Edie, it's one thing for Le Breton to be so communistic as all that comes to, and quite another thing for you and me. Le Breton's father was a general and a knight, you see; and people will never forget that his mother's Lady Le Breton still, whatever he does. He may do what he likes in the way of social eccentricities, and the wo

n. I should stick to mine, I'm sure, and wear whatever dress I liked, in spite of anybody. It's a sweet thing, really, isn't it?' And she tu

s while you were an undergraduate; and I'm dying to have got there, now the chance has really come at last, after al

l now. It's just as well you haven't gone up to Oxford till after your trip on the Continent with me. That three months in Paris, and Switze

ef that a person who can't find anything new to say about the every-day world around her won't discover much suggestive matter for conversation in a Continental Bradshaw. It's like that feeble watery lady I met at the table d'hote at Geneva. From something she said I gathered she'd been in India, and I asked her how she liked it. "Oh," she said, "it's very hot." I told her I had heard so before. Presently she said something casual

e to tone down slightly your exuberant and excessive vitality. Still, you know, from the point of view of society, which is a force we have always to reckon with-a constant, in fact, that we may call Pi-there can be no doubt in the world that to have been on the Continent is a diff

palaces, and mountains, and waterfalls we've seen, and not because of Pi's opinion of me for having seen them. I would have been the same person really whether I'd seen them or not; but I'm so much the richer myself for that v

of,' said her mother, coming up from the shop hot and flurried

dozen times over in her outburst of sympathy. 'That horrid old Miss Catherine has been here again, I'm sure, for I saw her going out of the shop just now

id say, but it was just the kind of thing that she mostly does, impudent like, just to hurt a body's

is hand, and kissing her forehead, 'that in the most advanced intellectual centres the Church catechis

It must be all plain sailing with her, without it's in the way of spite, and then she sees her chance to tack round the hardest corner with half a wind i

ine for your unit, multiply her to the nth, and there you see the irreducible power we have to fight against. All one's political economy is very well in its way; but the practical master of the situation is Pi, sitting autocratically in many-headed judgment on our poor solitary little individualities, and crushing us irretrievably with the de

s Catherine. She's a bit soured, you see, by disappointments and one thing and another. She doesn't

positions. Mr. William Sikes had a nature (no doubt congenital) which impelled him to beat his wife-I'm not sure that she was even his wife at all, now I come to think of it, but that's a mere detail-and to kick his familiar acquaintances casually about the head. We, on the other hand, have natures which impel us, when we catch Mr. William Sikes indulging in these innate idiosyncrasies by way of r

mag, and I won't listen to you any longer. How pretty Edie do look in her new dress, to be sure, Harry. I'll warr'nt

r old-fashioned tea together in the little parlour behind the shop, looking out over the garden, and the beac