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Sunday morning. As I climbed down the broken warren of the cliff to bathe I met the prettiest girl climbing up, positively the very prettiest. I stood aside on the jagged path to let her pass, and up she went, her eyes downcast, her smooth cheek colored by the sea. She looked like a charming sketch by Caldecott, or of the type the English painters of 1840 were so fond of. How J. J. would have loved to have painted her. I wish I may meet her again; I feel quite hopeful at the thought she may revisit my lonely bay.

camp-stool by the roadside, puzzling | prim and contented, side by side they over a guessing competition. Do I sit in the cart. Such men work down ever go in for 'em? He does, and as to the very last moment, till death, out often as not gets 'em right, having had for a country holiday, chances to look a lot of practice. Now, how many in at Magpie Hill. I knew one like him words do I suppose he made out of in Somersetshire. "Seems to me I Northern Whig? Now, guess. I make don't feel s' very well," said he one a stupendous effort, and say "Fifty." morning, straightening himself up and "Five underudd and forty-seven," says looking frightened at the unaccustomed he with dignity; and his eyes disappear sensation. In a quarter of an hour he in laughing little bags and wrinkles at was dead. my surprise. Whereat the children playing near by at Zulus give a shrill cheer. So I leave him staring at his dingy papers in the sunset, and come home to supper across the marsh and through the dappled wood. Of all excellent pieces of nature, give me my farmer. Always busy, always cheerful, always earning his crust; either with a sickle, hacking away at the rough grass on the ragged bit of lawn, where the black and white kitten plays in front of my window; or bent double, rummaging among the potatoes; or with his broad hand thwacking the cows to The children have come, and are in bring them faster home; or carrying a and out of their cottage just above the world of straw on his back that is little breakwater where the black lobcrossed with broad braces like a St. An- ster-pots are clustered, opposite the lifedrew. And a pipe- always a pipe-boat house; Belle with her tiny teeth and a straw hat, and a narrow belt of as white as the youngest hazel-nut, and dank leather round his huge loins. He Wah with his broad aspect of an infant can't write, and I don't suppose can do Henry VIII. I came upon them on the more than spell out the capital letters; shore, this brilliant blue and white never was in London, and, indeed, morning, to find a castle built, and Wah, never was out of the Island but once, fatigued with his labors, fast asleep unwhen he crossed the water twenty years der a cotton umbrella. The wind was ago and came back the same day. Put blowing the sand into his shelter; it him down in a copse, he says, and he crept on to his white frock and up his knows where he is; but put him in a solid cheeks among his tumbled hair. large town, and he sort of goes sense- What is there to London children so less. He has a brother, a gamekeeper fragrant as the sea? How well I re(fine tall man) over the water; never member the first whiffs of it at Hasthears from him; course he would if ings, the clatter of the new bucket and anything was to happen; so correspond-spade, the bumping of the boxes as they ence, which is a source of comfort to so many, is only a source of alarm and apprehension to him. You see there are a large number of people in the world to whom a letter never means anything but death or a disaster of some kind.

A ceaseless worker my farmer, even on a Sunday, and an excellent husband. Twice a week I see him driving his wife down to the village to sell the butter;

were carried up-stairs, the taste of the shrubs in Robertson Square, all briny with the winter waves splashed over the parade. Belle will remember all this, too, I suppose, and me helping her to build and taking the little green crabs out of the lobster-pots; as I remember, dimly, the figure of a kind uncle bringing me a flag out of the Hastings Arcade.

Tuesday. -Vivat! I go to play ten- | visitor at a cottage door. He is neither nis at a house where I have a letter of beaten nor humbled; he holds his basintroduction, and there, on the lawn ket just as his grandsire might have under the flagstaff, there is my prettiest done, if the fortune of war had made girl. The house is bright with shining him prisoner and forced him to peddle windows and with clematis, the long, low at Verdun. I can imagine an émigré slate roof is whitewashed, the gardens bearing himself SO while teaching so brilliant with flowers that the passers- French in a girls' school at Kensington. by pause to look over the green gate; and no flower brighter than she none. And she is heart-free, too, I am sure; her eyes, her bearing, her laugh assure me of it. Before the afternoon is over I find myself wondering who may be destined to touch so frank and charming a nature, and wishing that it might be I. We part, and I stroll round to the cottage to see Wah and Belle put to bed. Wah is already gurgling happily in his cot, warm and scented from his seawater bath, over his bottle; while Belle, flushed in her white nightgown, calls to me from the window in her pretty voice to "take care of myself!" She is in the habit of calling so to her father as he sets off to the City in the morning to win her bread and butter.

August 11. — Droll ups and downs in this madcap world of ours. I was standing this morning for shelter from the rain under the verandah in front of the grocer's, next an elderly man munching bread and cheese. His basket was by his side, and seeing me look at it, he asked me quietly if I wanted any chickens or a melon? I didn't, but as the rain still splashed we fell to talking. There was an air of breeding about him in his face and in his voice, and he told me quite naturally that if people didn't want to buy he never bothered them; being himself, as he might say, a gentleman. Grandfather was Admiral Sir John Taffrail, left very little money, not being lucky in the way of prizes; but what little there was the father invested in an hotel, with disastrous results. Failure, and the family thrown on the world; and the world, having other things to think of than the grandsons of gallant admirals, just tolerates him and his basket and gives its dirty linen to his wife. So, as the skies clear, off he trudges, and I see his blunt head and trim white moustache chaffering with a

Tea on the Shore. - Books to the winds; they are going to have tea on the shore among the rocks in my lonely bay, and she has asked me to join them. First we clamber after sticks, and I toil up the tumbled cliff after her pretty figure, and then we scratch a hole in the sand and make a fire. While the kettle boils we launch the boat and I sit up in the stern getting wet through, and watch the charming face grown serious in her strenuous efforts to keep the Seagull's head straight to the waves. This is better than reading Morley's "Diderot," say I to myself. Oh, Encyclopædists, what place does love and its dawning find among your labors? know not where I am being carried in this tossing old boat, but I know that I am happy. You cannot well be more than that in life.

I

I find they are my neighbors, and live in the farm close by, whose light I can see as I go out to take a turn on the verandah before going to bed. The house is covered with ivy, through which the roses over the porch peep; and along the low garden wall that runs. round the little tennis-court there hangs a great purple splash of clematis. There are many gay flowers and fig-trees and apple-trees all tumbled together, and a stately rose garden, and a huge, dense hedge of filberts to break the strong west winds from off the sea. There are beehives and a dark, mysterious potting - house, and another garden gaudy with sunflowers and phlox and dahlias and anemones; and the yard with its stables, and the barrel for the setter that is her constant companion, and absorbs nearly all her affection. "Love me, love my dog." I pat Bruce hypocritically, and proclaim him the noblest of his kind.

They make me welcome to their house; free to put my letters in the

else ever uses the lane, except an odd little dried old man I sometimes meet there as I stroll along reading my letters before breakfast. He tells me he comes to bathe, as the bathing is so good in the bay; only he is very much afraid of the wasps; one stung him once in the foot

basket in the hall for the postman to with books and papers, the windows fetch in his evening trudge; free of that open on to the ragged lawn, the their books in the shelves each side of pear-trees, and even the black pig-styes; the fireplace: "Household Words," and, best of all, the green lane along Cobbett's "Register," the Abbotsford which I often see Clematis pass in the edition of the Waverley Novels; free mornings to bathe. Scarcely any one even to play on the stiff piano in the neat little drawing-room, with its photographs and its china. I am free to come and go, to see Clematis, to play tennis with her when it is fine, cards with them when the evenings are wet, to help her feed Bruce, to come the short way through the rickyard from my own farm, to stroll over the garden with her to the corner where her canary seed is ripening and the tobacco plant hangs with its proud white petals, proud of the hold it has over the troubled senses of humanity.

And I am free of the thick bread and butter and gooseberry jam on the shore, and before tea is over feel friends with all. How different S. Kensington with its watchful mamma, who "will not have that young man coming so much to the house;" its son, who doesn't think much of you because he never sees you riding in the Row; its selfconscious daughter, whose marriage is arranged and will shortly take place in the guinea paragraphs of the Morning Post. Retro, S. Kensington! for me henceforth the simplicities of a farm life, up at 5.30, and all lights out soon after nine.

Toutes les jeunes filles sont moqueuses, says Balzac; all but Clematis, with her short upper lip and her clear and fearless glance.

August 16. Simple as my life is, and happily buried as I feel, still London with its gigantic feelers reaches after me. Londoners are in the neighborhood, and I must go lunch with them. I never want to see London again, never want to go to another private view or first-night; I want only to have a rick-yard of my own and dine henceforth at half past twelve. Stiil, I must go, and before I can look round find myself drawn into tableaux vivants, a dance, and a picnic.

But when I get back to Magpie Hill how glad I am to see the table littered

must be a good many years ago now -and he bows himself away, deprecatingly, in his long black coat and broad felt hat. There's an odd procession, too, occasionally passes: a tall old man in a kind of white kennel coat, two little solemn boys in ragged knickerbockers and blue jerseys, a sallow girl, and a rubicund, middle-aged lady in an oldfashioned black straw hat. The procession is always in the same order, and I have never seen them speak; but the girl and the middle-aged lady always pause to look round the corner of the wall at my farmer's collie, Prince, chained up to watch the back door. They set him violently barking, appear quite satisfied, and pass on.

Once

How odd many lives are, or seem, rather; because one doesn't, perhaps, quite understand them. There's a long, one-storied red-brick house I pass daily on my way to the village to fetch my paper; one of those shallow houses one can see right through, more especially once a fortnight, when the white lace curtains are sent to the wash. only have I seen the occupant standing in the strip of garden - a distinguishedlooking old man with white moustache and imperial, and an expression of somewhat savage defiance. He never speaks to any one, and employs no servant, allows no one inside the house, and has the milk even left at the door; only Clematis tells me that once, going to church, and caught in the rain, the old gentleman courteously ran after her with an umbrella, and, jealously guarding his door, was waiting there to receive it back on her return. Once or twice he has come upon them hav

And Clematis fetches me at ten and we drive home together, pausing only to buy fruit, which we eat as we go along, the placid old horse dragging us dutifully back to our farm.

a country house and Queen's Gate Gar-like the last few rehearsals of the new dens drawing-room; and now with local play before the first night; there is young ladies, and some few supercilious hurry and irritability, and the ordinary Londoners, to the ponderous brass tenor of life seems quickened and alstrains of the town band, located in the tered. I even take a rake myself and gallery among the maids and drapers' try to become useful, but it ends in tea assistants, who are only waiting for us alone with Clematis in the cool and to have done to begin their own revelry. shady parlor after she has driven down With the result that I wake at seven to to Longlands to take the men their afterhear the servants of the house return noon meal. So gentle, friendly, trustand set to work pulling up the blinds, ing a nature I have never met; but her and going about their duties as though love seems all for Bruce the setter, and the night had been spent in bed. none other. I sometimes think I had better go away, and would, only that I have my work to finish. We play cards in the evening, and I win sixpence and go home in the brilliant moonlight to hear the sea rustling on the shingle of But life is not all falling in love, and my bay. I try to form some message I have my work to do, and try to do it. out of ocean's voices, but I can hear Only I know that I never go round nothing but its unrest. Everywhere to the farm, past the outhouses and unrest and doubt; and how can we tell Bruce's kennel under the walnut-tree, that even in the grave it will be otherthrough the gate and to the open win-wise? "Invideo quia quiescunt," said dow of the little sitting-room, without a singular beating of the heart and an agitation of which, to tell the truth, I never see the slightest trace in Clematis. She never blushes nor seems moved; never is she anything but calm and bright and friendly; her sweet eyes shine a little, that is all, as she looks up from her work, and out we go together after mushrooms, or on to the down to the Hermit's Cave, or along the cliff to the children's cottage to find Wah with raspberry jam on his forehead and Belle administering tea to a battered doll. I never make love to her, nor approach it; I only try to amuse and interest her, and all the time I go on, as D'Alroy says in "Caste," falling, falling in love, till it seems I shall never reach the bottom. Shall I not speak to her? Ah, but the risk:

Luther in the churchyard; but who
knows what anxieties there may not be
in store for us even there? Should I
be any happier if I knew Clematis loved
me? After winning a heart, is there
not the added torment of trying to keep
it? To bed, to bed!
September 8.

The one brilliant week of the year, and it passes like a golden dream. Nothing to say about it; one never has if one has been happy. And to-morrow I must go among the Londoners and wear dress-clothes.

September 13.-I walked back over the downs in the moonlight, and, as I won the height, breathed when I saw below the lights of the farm. Faraway at sea the beacon of the guardship flashed; and far, the spangled lights of Southsea. I stole past their window and saw them sitting round the flaring lamp. Bruce gave no sign as I passed his barrel; he seems to know my footstep, and is sure I mean no harm. Good watch-dog, guard thy dear mistress and mine!

To gain a lover or lose a friend. August 31.-It is harvest now, and the corn hangs on hedge and branch, torn from the great wagons as they go lumbering past to the rickyard. There are strange and burly men about, acrehands, and there is nothing but preoccu- scarcely pation and anxiety and watching of the to her. glass at the farm. Harvest time seems are in life.

I have been playing tennis and dining at eight, taking in a young woman, and knowing what I talked about Strange, how solitary we all

Which of us does not feel