caught by a dancing mote in the enveloping glory of sky and sun and sea. Across the bay there is a wooded cliff, and the flight of birds above it draws one's eyes thither for a moment. It is good to be there on such a day as this; when its shady walks are walled with amber foliage, and the small herbs of the banks are illumined in russet and crimson; it is good, too, to be there in spring, when the young buds are variously purple, or green, or silver, and the yellow daffodils nod above a brown carpet of rustling leaves, or amid a tangle of fresh grass. But to get there, one has to pass through the sleepy town behind us, built on the narrow point between the sheltered bay and the purple island-dotted sea, where half the shops are closed and the rest have relapsed contentedly into a cheerful idleness. There is a swarm of empty villas, white and red and fancifully bedecked with tiles, locking out blankly seaward with shuttered windows, beside the deserted casino and the solitary plage, where only the surf beats loudly on the yellow sand and flings itself in leaping foam upon the rocks. Yes, it sounds melancholy; and in truth, for those who need a small incessant torment of frivolity, one cannot call it gay. But for those who only love a crowd when they can be solitary in it; as in a great city, where, if one so choose, one may live the lonelier for being in the midst of a swarming life; for such a one, it is pleasant beyond comparison in the long autumn sunshine which dapples the world with gold and pearl, and flickers merrily between the poplars on the wide white roads; one has space and the leisure to be alone with one's self, and to find one's self infinite good company.

There are, moreover, the people of the place, who now have time to

amuse themselves, and the wherewithal, it is to be supposed, having taken in the stranger and entertained him, for a consideration; there are even a few English, who look at one suspiciously, as they pass by, with the flicker of a critical smile. And for distractions, if one have the mind thereto, they are not lacking; but they are such as need a humble spirit and a discerning eye. There is, for instance, always the church, where one may betake one's self, and find reflected one's every mood even to the unvirtuous. There is a particular curé, who has stepped down to us from the happy days when Gargantua was king and Rabelais his chronicler ; for though he may be actually, as I must not doubt, a very saintly person, he has a moist eye and a personal contour that seem to clash with a proper asceticism. So one casts him mentally as the jovial monk, in one's peripatetic romances wherein he must dance to all manner of tunes; though it is a grievous liberty to take with a worthy dignitary of the Church, who, moreover, wears ermine and lace, and who doubtless cannot help his comfortable figure.

The church, one finds, is here a very live thing in the midst of the life about it. It is never empty; it is full of the faint smell of incense, and the pungency of continual occupation; sabots clatter in and out, children come and go with sudden, hasty genuflections; old women sit in the corners, or tell their beads before the altars; the lights flicker and the tall plaster figures look down graciously smiling, or gaze upward in a rapturous adoration. They are conventionally young, and round-fleshed, and radiant in their tenderly coloured robes, and quaint contrasting gauds of crown and necklet and pendent votive hearts; conventional symbols of conventions, and stiffly beautiful with a

beauty that is itself a tradition, a beauty that is a rubric and an article of the Faith, and a lingering small acceptance from the far days of a facile content in things religious.

Then the church fills with a swarm of white caps which lift themselves strangely into snowy wings and crests, so that one may pick out the women of the different pays; and men's voices chant sonorously, and the full-rigged model ships, hanging in the chancel and before the Mary-altar, vibrate and swing softly to and fro at the opening and shutting of doors. Those who have hung them there have long been dead; but there are faces in the crowd beneath that are raised towards them, and eyes that grow dim,-too dim to see the dust of years that blackens the rigging, too dim to see anything but that more distant ship that is away at the Banks or at Iceland, in the fear of storms and the strange confusion of the fogs, and that will surely come back, unless—“Étoile de la Mer,

send us our men home from the sea!"

And in the lady-chapel, amid the rosaries and the trinkets and the gilded hearts, are hung a string of tiny boats, roughly carved from common wood and shaped by rude fingers; but the prayer and the thanksgiving are as strong about them as about the stately ships hanging high overhead. One looks at them and remembers the greed of the engulfing waters; the gray enveloping bewilderment of the mists; the fathers and husbands and sons who are amid them; the long summers when there is no word of the absent, and the autumn, when the women wait day by day for the first dim sight of the homecoming boat. And there are those who must wait, and wait, for the boat that never comes back-"Etoile de la Mer, send us our men home from the sea!"

And now there is a movement in the church, and as if a wind swept in

from the west the white caps sway before it, and the quaint white heads stoop and bow to the ground, with a quick rustle and an after silence

But it is hot to-day, too hot to make one of the crowd; it is incomparably better in the full breadth of the sunshine, where the gold and blue of the sky stretches to its large horizons; where one can fancy for a moment that this is verily the South, and a land where winter may not come. And yet one has only to walk along the white road yonder, towards that young grove of palms (as at least one imagines them to be) from here, with the children running beneath and the bright sea glittering between the tapering stems; a little closer, and one will see that they are not palms, any more than that is the iridescent water of the Mediterranean.. They are but cabbages, and we are still in Brittany.

In this country, cabbages certainly play a great part in the landscape, and not a wholly unpicturesque one, either; with their loose gray-green leaves springing in tufts atop of five-foot stalks, and the sun dancing in checkers along the alleys between them, where the children come and go. But indeed this is the paradise of vegetables; one lingers in the market and before the shops, marvelling at the clean perfection of the things and the excellence of them in form and colour. What beauty is there of blossom that is not modestly shared by these cauliflowers, creamy and globular in their encircling fringe of tender green, the smooth golden rind and warmer flesh of the pumpkins, the scarlet carrots, and the angry crimson of the aubergines? But the cabbages are not to be seen as they should be, either in market or shop; but in groves on the hillsides, with the sun full on their loose frilled leaves, and the sea glittering

wan

Last night, no longer, it sounded in one's ears with an odd tenderness, that foolish little word; it was only a child that said it, a thin woman-child in a tattered gown and sabots on her bare feet, leading a ragged boy bigger than herself by a motherly hand. I do not know whence they came, but they had ravenous eyes and pinched blue lips, and they looked about them strangely; till presently the girl caught sight of a scrap of sweet cake that had fallen amid the rubbish in the gutter, dropped in passing, perhaps, or indifferently thrown away. She seized it eagerly and wiped it on her gown; for one instant her hand hesitated and her eyes glittered uncertainly; then, with a quick movement, she held it to the boy's mouth and smiled superior. "But no," she said, as he offered reluctantly to share it; "keep it, mon chou! I am too old, you know, for sweet things." But she was old enough, poor little soul, to be hungry; and old enough, too, to lie with a wonderfully saving grace, in spite of the longing in her eyes.

And à propos of cabbages, one has an intimate acquaintance with many, of the human sort; the men and women that are born and live and die in an apathy miscalled life, and who transmute the tragedy of existence into a sort of brassicaceous melodrama. There is a small town in the north of England, sinking nowadays fast into a village,-one of

many similar, no better and no worse, it is to be supposed-where one may pass from house to house, and find a history in each; where one may ring the changes on every combination of possession and desire; and where the sordid commonplaces of death are as little dignified as the daily needs of living.

But among these people every passion and emotion is worn with an unreserve which is never enthusiastic ; they are born cynical and unresponsive, and, unbelieving, are indifferent in their unbelief. "No, I don't think much on church," said a little servant-girl of fourteen ; "I don't set no store by it. But there is the choir teas an' thingsan' the priest he come a botherin'So she had been confirmed, indifferently as she did everything else; and chuckled a little over the foolishness of it. And amid the tragedies which are not tragic, and the sorrows which stop short of tears, they live through life indifferently; they "set no store by it"; but they take it as it is, and amuse themselves as they can, with or without benefit of clergy. One may pick up the plots of a dozen dramas; till presently one finds that the dramatic element has been left out, and there is only a futile episode or two which lead inconsequently to nothing.

There was a love-affair, for instance; a youth, the son of a respectable man in the village, who fell in love with one of the girls of the place, deeply in love, one supposes, as these things go, to judge from the continuation. They were seventeen or thereabouts. He was 66 not over clever," as they said there, short, and broad-shouldered and silent; she was a white-faced longlimbed slip of a girl, with a swinging walk and a pair of roving black eyes; she had gipsy blood in her, and carried its mark in her shapely hands

and upheld head. Not a likely pair to take to each other, one would think; but after "sweethearting" during a few summer weeks, they electrified the village by going off together to Newcastle, leaving word behind that they meant to be married. This was all wrong; they might have stayed at home and amused themselves, as others did; that was the ordinary behaviour of young men and women, and no one would have questioned it. But to run off together, when there was no need, and to get married before there was any necessity, a thing no one ever thought of thereabouts; this was strictly unnatural and improper; the culprits must be followed, and the thing prevented.

So some of his brothers went off after him and brought him back; he was not at all put about, and took the matter calmly, as he had taken the elopement, as an incident of but small importance; and the girl came back too, while there was another incident a few months after, that was accepted in the same matter-of-course way. The years went on, without very much change of any kind. Ben was a little older and more bearded, as silent as ever and not much wiser; he spoke to the girl sometimes at the street-corners, and never seemed aware of the small object in knickerbockers that was already old enough to go to school. It was eight years after the elopement, and when the object above mentioned was fully seven years old, that Ben slouched one evening into the room where the girl lived with her people. I do not know how he found words enough in which to explain himself, but he made them understand that the banns were out, and that he meant to marry her in three weeks. "I couldn't do't afore," he added, "but they've give me a rise at last." All the eight years

he had been waiting for this; and Janey persuaded herself that she had been as faithful, and did her best, one supposes, to revive a dutiful affection, with an astonished delight that marriage should have come her The pre

way.

Well; it was soon over. parations, and the service, and the pride of being well-dressed, and in the vestry, the vicar's hesitating congratulations. He said, with a glance at them both, that he hoped they had not taken this step without thinking it over carefully; and Ben replied, with the air of saying a neat thing, that he had been thinking of it for eight years. Then the return home, to Janey's home, where there was little space, scant furniture, and less of privacy or ventilation; but there was food in plenty and rather more than enough to drink; so that presently, the neighbours first protesting and then ejecting, Ben was picked up by the police upon the sidewalk, where he had fallen down the stairs, and finished his long courtship by a night (his marriage-night) in the cells.

I wish I could carry the idyll a little further, but the romance, such as it was, soon dropped out of it; for some weeks later, when they took a little outing to Newcastle, Ben came back alone and seemed to have no answer ready for intrusive questioners. He looked like a dog that had been beaten; but he had neither then, nor since, anything to tell; only he lives alone in his one-room cottage and works for Janey's boy, to whom he has attached himself limpet-like and wordlessly, as he did to his mother, and with small chance of better result. I saw them lately, the boy an idle rascal with a vicious brow and sullen furtive eyes, loafing about the streets and spending the pence that he steals from his father,

or from any one else when occasion offers; while Ben looks at him with the same obstinate fidelity which he gave to Janey. There should be a tragedy somewhere here, but there is nothing so convincing; only a small incessant wretchedness, the sight of which tastes bitter in the mouth and salt as tears; a wretchedness which, with love and life, and death, is but an episode of an incidental existence.

Yet this dulness of emotion is not at all confined to that district, or to that class; there are many of us, that are by choice, or by inheritance, cabbages. It was but the other day that a marriage at the last moment was broken off because the man, on thinking it over, could not face the change, the unsettling of all the habits which he had built up about himself. This he told her, not softening the thing, being well convinced of its reasonableness, and having his eyes turned in upon himself; and then he retired happily to his daily routine and the encroaching rigours of the small things he made into his masters. They said she was foolish enough to be unhappy over it; but it is to be inferred that she had no consoling habitudes to absorb her thoughts. At least he was honest, he went to her with the truth in his mouth; only honesty is so terribly naked by contrast with this world of underclothing, that one wonders if he had not better have lied; unless the cabbage would verily not have withstood the uprooting.

It is fortunate that we have, most of us, the power of living through things; for if we were all to die when we are broken-hearted, we should too often be despatched into another world in an early state of unfitness. But the night passes and the blackness of it, and the morning is fair; it is good to be alive and a cabbage and

wholesomely indifferent to the big passions that torture men.

We all, I suppose, have some sort of a private and particular "lake and a fairy boat" in which we may sail upon a magic sea, and dream dreams; or we watch for its coming, laden with fortune, fame, or love; or it will spread, at our will, its silver wings and carry us to the strange bright lands that sit beside the further seas. There is little doubt that one paints Bangkok, or Mandalay, or Soûl in a beauty that is not theirs, when one dreams of walking in their streets and living in the midst of their life; but there are some of us, cabbages though we be, that yet are born with the wander-need within us; the roads that our feet have not trodden call to us, and sooner or later, we come. Some day, I, too, shall go to Siam. And when that day arrives, I do not hope that electricity will project us to our destinations, or even that that ancient delight, the flyingcarpet, will be trained to daily use; do not ask for anything better than the promiscuousness of a railway-carriage, the bustle of coming and going at the stations, the crossing, changing, jostling, hurrying life that flashes past, the faces that look in upon us, the words we recall afterwards, the infinitely small things of which memory is made. Only the other day, -it was in France-we travelled eight in a compartment, not to speak of bags and bundles; the racks above us were laden, and we sat in stiff-necked expectancy, in the shadow of impending catastrophes. We were eight three young and small soldiers, an English couple, two women, and myself; moreover, one of the women was large and unslender, overlapping her neighbours and incommoding the soldier sitting opposite to her, who was sleepy, and slipped presently into a comforta sprawl. "But, Monsieur le Mili!

I