'You won't find her. I have just seen her off with your sister, with Dad, and with Miss-Miss Eccentricity-name very near that.'

Here Lynton set out his narrative, adding that, having discharged this part of his mission, he had called at Fowler's Inn to report the condition of the sick

woman.

'She desires to see her relatives,' said he, and you had better be quick if you want to see her alive.' 'I can take five minutes to finish ?'

Don't be longer.'

'I think so. 'The Upper Ten is on the table somewhere. Read for Mr. Grimble my debût in journalism. I open with an apostrophe to Cromwell, apropos of the bauble. Just say how it comes in.'

And Talbot resumed his letterwriting in a manner of great haste.

'That reminds me,' said Lynton, 'I bought a copy of the Upper Ten first thing when I came out to-day, and haven't had time to steal a look at it since. Should be in my pocket. Now, sir, you won't be hard on this fledgling journalist.'

'Fledgling humbug!' said the Crane-street Diogenes. Look here, young man, what philosophical tenet do you hold of the journalist ?'

Lynton looked at him in wonder. Talbot was too engrossed to heed.

'There he stands gaping. Not a word more than the rest of the gabbling herd. I pronounce the journalist to be the sharp impostor in the crowd round the political jugglers playing their tricks of State, who pretends to know how the oracle is worked, and to tell you all about it. Is that the philosophy of your journalist, or is it not ?

Well, I prefer to think that our friend Welbore there resembles the Genius of Probability in the parable, you know-the fellow who

undertook to bear the blind mortal safely over the Valley of Ignorance, but left him floundering in the abyss. Welbore would think that a nicer way to put it, I suspect, now that he has his amour propre as a newspaper man.'

'Newspaper man!' echoed the morose and implacable Peter. 'A fellow who clothes himself in the skins of enormous gooseberries, fattens on sea-serpents and threeheaded calves, and draws his pleasure from calamity and crime. Am I right, or am I wrong?'

He fell to with his teeth on the wooden carving, and made a gnawing like that of rats in the wainscot. Lynton had by this time taken his measure; so, yielding the ground of argument, he wrestled with his pocket for the first fruits of Talbot's graphic talent. While he did so, Talbot had finished his writing, and was busy with the envelope.

'How is this article of yours headed, Welbore?'

""Senators in Session," I fear. I suggested "Sketches in the Commons," but they insisted on apt alliteration's vulgar aid.'

'Hallo! What's this?'

Talbot looked at his friend, who was curiously studying the page before him.

'Well, Lynton? I have been dubious about that start. How would the Lord Protector take it?'

Lynton did not answer for some moments. Then he said:

'I know how Mr. Grantley Welbore will be likely to take it. Finish. Quick. I have something private to say to you.'

Astonishment and some yet more powerful feeling were expressed in his manner.

6 Why, Lynton, you haven't caught me setting the Thames on fire! What is it?'

Lynton stepped to the desk at which Talbot wrote, and, without

few hours might have had the most disastrous consequences.

Lynton almost bundled out the Professor, and then, returning to where his friend turned the leaves in his hand with a dazed incredulous air, struck him a sharp blow on the shoulder.

'Come. Here's your hat. Clear out; clear out! I give you while I count three to march by the gas. One, two, three! Lights out. Now lead down, or I spring over the baluster.'

Talbot hardly needed the infection of his friend's energy. The two men made at a rush for the cab-stand outside the Inn. ton gave the direction. added,

Lyn

He

'Drive your fastest, and charge accordingly.'

VOL. XXXI.

AA

WHEN one has turned the 'top of the hill,' and the disagreeable fact that henceforth the journey must be more or less downwards becomes established, and is painfully apparent by the ever-increasing velocity with which the days, or, as we may say, the milestones on the road of life, fly by; when wind and limb cease to respond willingly to the call which strong exercise makes upon them, and there arises a growing desire to ride or drive where once we preferred walking; when our feelings are expressed by the lines. of a popular writer of society verse, when he declares,

'My wind in waltzing 's growing scant,
In climbing hills I oftener want

To view the prospect fine.
Nought care I now for hair or eyes,
But have great faith in Strasbourg pies,
And something know of wine.'

When all this has come to pass, I say, the so-called holiday season is apt to enforce the truth upon us more strongly than any other. In following the course of our regular life-whatever it is we do not appear to be so very conscious of the world's rotatory motion. We spin on in the humdrum horse-atthe-mill sort of groove into which we have gradually settled with placid equanimity; and it is often only when long days and bright weather awaken wandering thoughts, and the beaten path becomes a little irksome, that we discover a slight disinclination to move. Thus such wandering thoughts, although they beget thoughts of wandering, and although they bring with them delightful pictures of bygone holiday joys, no longer stir us with

that old exhilaration and spirit of enterprise which we erewhile felt when premeditating a raid into the open,' and we are apt rather to sit and dream than act; to dream over again and again those trips and

excursions we were wont to make, far afield, than actually to put our best leg forward and step out across the turf and the heather. It is not that we love Nature less, but ease the more, and so become inclined to agree with the dictum that the best way to travel is in an armchair with a book; and, short of any one else's book, with one of our own, especially if it be one of notes or of sketches, or both.

Such literary and pictorial memoranda, however trifling, afford plenty of stuff on which to weave

holiday dreams,' and enable us to live through once more those pleasant times spent among the woods and fields, the crags and fells, the ice-peaks or verdant valleys, or among the purple mountains and by the side of solemn lakes, broad silvery streams, rushing torrents, and tumbling rivulets. It matters not whither chance or inclination have taken us; if our holiday lines have been cast in pleasant places we can revisit them in spirit, as we glance through the record, be it slight or voluminous, which we made at the time; and it always appears to me that, however poor one's efforts at the graphic art may be, that notebook of travel, which is illustrated by a few rough sketches, acts as a far more powerful talisman upon the memory than mere verbal jot

tings will do. Hence, I would say, in parenthesis, let him who would 'see the wonders of the world abroad' learn something of drawing. Albeit he may not have any great capacity, and does not aspire to artistic repute, his poorest efforts, his merest smudges, will be better than nothing when the time comes, as come it will, in which he finds retrospect more attractive than prospect, and dreaming of holidays easier than taking them. I never cease urging the payment of some little devotion to sketching for other reasons. Man cannot happily fulfil his mission in civilised society without a hobby; and if he happen to have anything like a love for, and an appreciation of, natural scenery, there can be no hobby which will help him so pleasantly and profitably through a holiday as that of being able to keep a pictorial record on paper of the scenes and places he visits. More than this: man is a collecting, hoarding animal; and by classifying and chronologically arranging the work of his brush or pencil he further fulfils his mission in this direction, whilst, if he really possesses any artistic skill, he gives infinite pleasure to others. In going through his portfolio or sketch-books with him, they can travel, as it were, over the ground which has yielded so much gratification to himself, and he thus finds companionship and sympathy in all the holiday dreams' he chooses to indulge in. The process becomes one of mutual satisfactionto his friends, in anticipation of pleasures to come, and to himself in dreaming of pleasures gone by. Say that this latter will prove but a melancholy business, and that there will inevitably crop up memories of the days that are no more,' companions gone, loves that are dead, opportunities lost, and all the rest of the sad associations inseparable from retrospect;

yet, as this is the fate of humanity and sorrows must go hand-in-hand with joys in this world, why, surely, we should accept it, make the best of it, and by so doing give the joys a fair chance of out-numbering and obscuring their reverse.

So let us dream on of holidays past; and if we but attune ourselves aright there will be plenty and to spare worth looking back upon, and in which there shall mingle so little that is sombre or gloomy that, considering our disinclination, or may be, unluckily, our inability, to move far afield, the occupation shall be no disagreeable makeshift. Nay, if we can but 'make believe'-hard enough, according to the creed of Dick Swiveller's marchioness-our fancy will carry us 'over the hills and far away,' where the blue waters dance in the sunlight, and the white cliffs and yellow sands sparkle and glitter; where the downs rise and swell, like the green waves of some motionless ocean. In company

with our own especial Ariel or Puck, we can put girdles round the world, fly on the back of a bat, make the wind our post-horse, or adopt any one of the various fairy-like means of locomotion which Shakespeare provides for his numerous tricksy sprites. We may thus find ourselves suddenly listening to and watching the trees, as they whisper and wave above our heads in the summer breeze, though in the flesh we may be mewed up at the moment in some smoky town. This sketch, to wit, done years ago, in some cool retreat in Sherwood or Windsor, shows fairly enough the play which the sunlight made through the leaves, and how the shadowed depths of the forest invited us to rest and be thankful. This next attempt at the painter's art takes us out to the skirts of the woodland, where it straggled away on to common or upland, and the

big windy clouds made chequered patterns of purple and brown, with the gold of the gorse and the broom, and the green and the gray of the meadow and mere.

Perhaps without plan or definite purpose we run through our folio or book of jottings, and come next upon corn-fields with the sheaves just being set up by the harvesting crew, who, with sickle and scythe, reap and mow away from end to end of the rich sunny slope. We recall how we sat beneath that belt of oak and ash on the left, and drank in the glory of the prospect beyond that great stretch away into blue nothing, where shire after shire lay spread out like a banquet for eyes and heart! It all comes back to us, that holidaytime in Sussex and Surrey; and although we have been tempted since then to 'journey across sea,' we have never-no, never-seen a landscape which, for pure beauty and sweet gentle grandeur, was equal to this, and dozens just like it. This was southern England in autumn; but we know it in spring, as our next little daub will recall.

Then coppice and hedgerow, pasture and moorland, were but filmed with a verdure so delicate, subtle, and tender that the art of a Linnell, a Turner, or a Millais alone could fully express it. Like the bloom on the peach is this first sign of Nature's joyous renewal of life, and can only be given a hint of by an amateur hand. Yet it is enough to recall it, and so help on the holidaydreams of the spring. Of course, like all dreams, they will shift, vary, and change with an electric rapidity which must make their record, in writing, a mere dream in itself, and quite incoherent, except in the spirit of reverent love for the beauty summoned up by our wandering thoughts. No attempt at

describing in detail such visions can be very successful; for, however vivid the picture presented in the mind's eye, by the aid of our drawings and journal, it will always be broad and general-a sort of mental David Cox or De Wint kind of sketch, where strong light and shade, and truth in the relative tones, must do duty for all, and suggest, rather than show, that tangle of wild flowers, herbage, and ferns decking our foreground.

Yonder tones of delicate azure, peeping out round the roots of the trees, are due to the bevy of bluebells which cluster in spring-time beneath the fretwork of branches; and here, on the bank, is the primrose which, dying unmarried ere it can behold bright Phœbus in his strength,' gives out a pale golden hue like a watery ray of sunlight. But the flowers and mosses, the leaves and the sprays, are but little made out; and so on with the whole of the landscape from foreground to distance, and from the threatening cumulus cloud on the horizon, to the mares' tails and cirrhus spangling the blue in the zenith. If our dreaming capacity flags, we must look for farther particulars to the notes of our holiday zigzags; and these will transport us back, without doubt, to many rambles and sojourns, and pleasant spring days.

Here, now, is one where, out by the Malverns, we wrote in rapturous eulogy of the young world; for the bright new garment it was just putting on made us feel that age was a myth for the time, and that, in the words of Madame de Girardin, 'Décidemment, le monde ne paraît pas son âge!' Thus we wrote: Impossible to say how delightful is this sweetest and most beautiful of places. I never remember feeling so joyous at heart as I do here-so glad with Nature.