the universal favourite, and there is always competition for her. In early morning I see the brown heads and blue bathing-dresses, a-mermaiding, as they call it, in the cove below, and they come in all glowing, with the floating tresses that make Metelill look so charming, and full of merry adventures at breakfast. We all meet in the great room at the hotel for a substantial meal at half-past one, and again (most of us at least) at eight; but it is a moot point which of these meals we call dinner. Very merry both of them are; Martyn and Horace Druce are like boys together, and the girls scream with laughter, rather too much so sometimes. Charley is very noisy, and so is Meg Druce, when not overpowered by shyness. She will not exchange a sentence with any of the elders, but in the general laugh she chuckles and shrieks like a young Cochin-Chinese chicken learning to crow; and I hear her squealing like a maniac while she is shrimping with the younger ones and Charley. I must except those two young ladies from the unconscious competition, for one has no manners at all, and the other affects those of a man; but as to the rest, they are all as nice as possible, and I can only say, 'How happy could I be with either.' Isa, poor girl, seems to need our care most, and would be the most obliging and attentive. Metelill would be the prettiest and sweetest ornament of our drawing-room, and would amuse you the most; Pica, with her scholarly tastes, would be the best and most appreciative fellow-traveller; and Jane, if she could or would go, would perhaps benefit the most by being freed from a heavy strain, and having her views enlarged.
10.-A worthy girl is Jane Druce, but I fear the Vicarage is no school of manners. Her mother is sitting with us, and has been discoursing to grandmamma on her Jane's wonderful helpfulness and activity in house and parish, and how everything hinged on her last winter when they had whooping-cough everywhere in and out of doors; indeed she doubts whether the girl has ever quite thrown off the effects of all her exertions then. Suddenly comes a trampling, a bounce and a rush, and in dashes Miss Jane, fiercely demanding whether the children had leave to go to the cove. Poor Margaret meekly responds that she had consented. 'And didn't you know,' exclaims the damsel, 'that all their everyday boots are in that unlucky trunk?' There is a humble murmur that Chattie had promised to be very careful, but it produces a hotter reply. 'As if Chattie's promises of that kind could be trusted! And I had
Jane could have shown no temper to the children, for at dinner a roly-poly person of five years old, who seems to absorb all the fat in the family, made known that he had had a very jolly day, and he loved cousin Avice very much indeed, and sister Janie very much indeeder, and he could with difficulty be restrained from an expedition to kiss them both then and there.
The lost box was announced while we were at dinner, and Jane is gone with her faithful Avice to unpack it. Her mother would have done it and sent her boating with the rest, but submitted as usual when commanded to adhere to the former plan of driving with grandmamma. These Druce children must be excellent, according to their mother, but they are terribly brusque and bearish. They are either seen and not heard, or not seen and heard a great deal too much. Even Jane and Meg, who ought to know better, keep up a perpetual undercurrent of chatter and giggle, whatever is going on, with any one who will share it with them.
10.-I am more and more puzzled about the new reading of the Fifth Commandment. None seem to understand it as we used to do. The parents are content to be used as equals, and to be called by all sorts of absurd names; and though grandmamma is always kindly and attentively treated, there is no reverence for the relationship. I heard Charley call her 'a jolly old party,' and Metelill respond that she was 'a sweet old thing.' Why, we should have thought such expressions about our grandmother a sort of sacrilege, but when I ventured to hint as much Charley flippantly answered, 'Gracious me, we are not going back to buckram'; and Metelill, with her caressing way, declared that she loved dear granny too much to be so stiff and formal. I quoted-
'If I be a Father, where is My honour?'
And one of them taking it, I am sorry to say, for a line of secular poetry, exclaimed at the stiffness and coldness. Pica then put in her oar, and began to argue that honour must be earned, and that it was absurd and illogical to claim it for the mere accident of seniority or relationship. Jane, not at all conscious of being an offender, howled at her that this was her horrible liberalism and neology, while Metelill asked what was become of loyalty. 'That depends on what you mean by it,' returned our girl graduate. '
'How you would jockey them!' cried Charley, turning upon her so roughly that the tears came into her eyes; and I must have put on what you call my Government-house look, for Charley subsided instantly.
11.-Here was a test as to this same obedience. The pupils, who are by this time familiars of the party, had devised a boating and fishing expedition for all the enterprising, which was satisfactory to the elders because it was to include both the fathers. Unluckily, however, this morning's post brought a summons to Martyn and Mary to fulfil an engagement they have long made to meet an American professor at --, and they had to start off at eleven o'clock; and at the same time the Hollyford clergyman, an old fellow-curate of Horace Druce, sent a note imploring him to take a funeral. So the voice of the seniors was for putting off the expedition, but the voice of the juniors was quite the other way. The three families took different lines. The Druces show obedience though not respect; they growled and grumbled horribly, but submitted, though with ill grace, to the explicit prohibition. Non-interference is professedly Mary's principle, but even she said, with entreaty veiled beneath the playfulness, when it was pleaded that two of the youths had oars at Cambridge, 'Freshwater fish, my dears. I wish you would wait for us! I don't want you to attend the submarine wedding of our old friends Tame and Isis.' To which Pica rejoined, likewise talking out of Spenser, that Proteus would provide a nice ancient nymph to tend on them. Her father then chimed in, saying, 'You will spare our nerves by keeping to dry land unless you can secure the ancient mariner who was with us yesterday.'
'Come, come, most illustrious,' said Pica good-humouredly, 'I'm not going to encourage you to set up for nerves. You are much better without them, and I must get some medusæ.'
It ended with, 'I beg you will not go without that old man,' the most authoritative speech I have heard either Martyn or Mary make to their daughters; but it was so much breath wasted on Pica, who maintains her right to judge for herself. The ancient mariner had been voted an encumbrance and exchanged for a jolly young waterman.
Our other mother, Edith, implored, and was laughed down by Charley, who declared she could swim, and that she did not think Uncle Martyn would have been so old-womanish. Metelill was so tender and caressing with her frightened mother that I thought here at last was submission, and with a good grace. But after a turn on the esplanade among the pupils, back came Metelill in a hurry to say, 'Dear mother, will you very much
Poor Edith fell into such a state of nervous anxiety that I could not leave her, and she confided to me how Charley had caught her foolish masculine affectations in the family of this very Bertie Elwood, and told me of the danger of an attachment between Metelill and a young government clerk who is always on the look-out for her. 'And dear Metelill is so gentle and gracious that she cannot bear to repel any one,' says the mother, who would, I see, be thankful to part with either daughter to our keeping in hopes of breaking off perilous habits. I was saved, however, from committing myself by the coming in of Isabel. That child follows me about like a tame cat, and seems so to need mothering that I cannot bear to snub her.
She came to propound to me a notion that has risen among these Oxford girls, namely, that I should take out their convalescent dressmaker as my maid instead of poor Amélie. She is quite well now, and going back next week; but a few years in a warm climate might be the saving of her health. So I agreed to go with Isa to look at
