heart-burnings there must be among the more snobbish shadows of Montparnasse! My guide made me pause and admire, and he likewise insisted on the tribute of my tear before an obelisk to slaughtered soldiers and a handsome memorial to burnt firemen.
But perceiving my impatience to arrive at the grave of Maupassant, 'Mais, monsieur,' he protested, 'il n'y a rien d'extraordinaire.' 'Vraiment!' said I, 'c'est la Vextraordinaire.' 'Rien du tout d'extraordinaire,' he repeated doggedly. 'Sauf le cadavre,' I retorted. He shook his head, 'Tres pauvre la tombe,' he muttered: 'pas du tout riche.' Another guardian, walleyed, here joined him, and catching the subject of conversation, 'Tres pauvre,' he corroborated compassionately. But he went with us, accompanied by a very lean young Frenchman with a soft felt hat, an over-long frock-coat, tweed trowsers, and a black alpaca umbrella. He looked like a French translation of some character of Dickens. At last we arrived at the grave. 'C'est la!' and both guardians shook their heads dolefully. 'Tres pauvre!' sighed one. 'Rien du tout- rien ,' sighed the other. And, thank Heaven, they were right. Nothing but green turf and real flowers, and a name and a date on a black cross-the first real grave I had come across. No beads, no tawdry images, nothing but the dignity of death, nothing but 'Guy de Maupassant, 6 Juillet, '93,' on the cross, and 'Guy de Maupassant, 1850-93,' at the foot. The shrubs were few, and the flowers were common and frost-bitten; but in that desert of bourgeois beads, the simple green grave stood out in touching sublimity. The great novelist seemed to be as close to the reality of death as he had been to that of life. Those other dead seemed so falsely romanticist. It was a beautiful sunny winter afternoon. There was a feel of spring in the air, of the Resurrection and the Life. Beyond the bare slim branches of the trees of the other cemetery, gracefully etched against the sky, the sun was setting in a beautiful bank of dusky clouds. Life was so alive that day, and death so dead. Outside the tomb the poem of light and air, and inside the tomb-what? I thought of the last words of 'Une Vie,' that fine novel, which even Tolstoi considers great, of the old servant's summing up: 'La vie, voyez-vous, ca n'est jamais si bon ni si mauvais qu'on croit. 'Perhaps,' thought I, ''t is the same with death.' 'The Societe des Gens de Lettres had to buy the ground for him,' interrupted the wall-eyed guardian compassionately. The Dickensy Frenchman heaved a great sigh. 'Vous croyez!' he said. 'Yes,' asseverated the other guardian-'he has it in perpetuity.' Ignorant of the customs of death, I wondered if one's corpse were liable to eviction, and whether the statute of limitations ought not to apply. 'Je pensais qu'il avait une certaine position,' observed the Frenchman dubiously. 'Non ,' replied the wall-eyed guardian, shaking his head, 'Non, il est mort sans le sou.' At the mention of coin I distributed pourboire. The first guardian went away. I lingered at the tomb, alive now to its more sordid side. Only one row of bourgeois graves, some occupied, some still ss louer, separated it from an unlovely waste piece of ground, bounded by the gaunt brick wall of the fast-filling cemetery. As I began to muse thereon, I heard a cry, and perceived my guardian peeping from round the corner of a distant tomb, and beckoning me with imperative forefinger. I wanted to stay; I wanted to have 'Meditations at the grave of Maupassant,' to ponder on the irony of death, to think of the brilliant novelist, the lover of life, cut off in his pride, to lie amid perspectives of black and lavender beads. But my guardian would not let me. 'Il n'y a rien ss voir,' he cried almost angrily, and haled me off to see the real treasures of his cemetery. In vain I persisted that I must not give him trouble, that I could discover the beauties for myself.' 'O monsieur!' he said reproachfully. Fearing he might return my pourboire, I followed him helplessly to inspect the pompous bead-covered tombs of the well-to-do, shocking him by stopping to muse at the rude mound of an anonymous corpse, remembered only by a little bunch of immortelles. One of the fashionable sepulchres stood open, and was being dusted by a man and a woman (on a dust from dust principle, apparently). Most of the dust seemed to be little beads. My keeper exchanged a word with the cleaners, and I profited by the occasion to escape. I sneaked back to the grave of Maupassant, but I had barely achieved a single Reflection, when 'Hola, hola!' resounded in loud tones from afar. I started guiltily, but in a moment I realised that it was the cry of expulsion. The sunset was fading, and the gates were to be locked. I hastened across the cemetery, evading my guardian's face of reproach, and in another few moments the paths were deserted, the twilight had fallen, and the dead were left alone with their beads.
After all the world is a large place. At the moment of writing I have never heard of Home Rule, nor do I care two straws whether the House of Lords is to be blown up on the fifth of November. What moves my interest, what stirs my soul, what arouses the politician that lurks in the best of us, is this question of the crab-pots. Shall the trawlers of Brixham be allowed to slash at our cords and to send our wicker baskets adrift, spoiling our marine harvests and making our larders barren against the winter? They hover about our beautiful bay-these fiends in human shape, with brown wings outspread-and wantonly lay waste our fishing-pots in their reckless course, so that our crabs walk backwards into the sea. We have had gentlefolks down from London about it, men who argue and palaver, and wear high hats and are said to have long bills, and there is talk of a Government cutter to protect us, towed by red tape, and the trawlers are to cast their nets farther asea. But beware of believing what you read in the Brixham papers,-we have no voice to represent us in the press, and so these Brixham organs spread falsehoods about us in every corner of the globe. A pretty pretence, forsooth, that it is the steamers who plough up our crab- pots. Why, from Michaelmas to Christmas, when the trawlers are away, not a single pot is disturbed from its station, though the funnels smoke as usual in the eye of heaven. No, no, ye hirelings of the press. Turn your mercenary quills elsewhere, beslaver Mr. Gladstone or belabour him, arbitrate on the affairs of nations, and throw your weighty influence into the scale of European politics. But do not confuse the mind of the country on the question of crab-pots.
We do not get the Brixham papers here, but friends in London tell us that is what they say. It is the same with the crabs-we have to order them from London. All local products come via London nowadays: London is like a central ganglion, through which all sensations must travel before being felt at the outside points where they were really incurred. This is the case even with Irish patriots: they are made in Ireland, but if you want them you have to go to London clubs for them. We have only had one funeral here since I came, and then we got our material from London. He had gone up to a London hospital-poor fellow!-and that was the end of him. The village butcher it was, who thus went the way of all flesh, and all of us went to his funeral and wept, for want of something else to do. One cannot always be flippant, even on a holiday. Fortunately the butcher left an aged father, who announced his intention of carrying on the business, so we dried our eyes and dined, sure of the future. We thought of the many creatures the deceased had killed-the Juno-eyed oxen, the tender lambs, the peaceful pigs-and we did not see why we should be so sentimental over the human species. We are all murderers, and yet we are ready to gush over the first corpse that comes along. How I envy the death-bed of a vegetarian!
We are not vegetarians here, but at least we eschew the six-course dinner which so few travellers ever succeed in shaking off, even in Ultima Thule. The most of modern travelling is a sort of Cook's Tour. Everywhere the menu is before you, everywhere waves the napkin, like the flag of civilisation. Nowhere do we eat ourselves into the real life of the people; everywhere the same monotonous variety of fare in kitchen-French. In the remotest Orkneys, in the caves of Iona, in the fjords of Norway, amid the crevasses of the Alps,-'tis the same tale of entrees and entremets. When Dr. Johnson made his tour in the Highlands, he was allowed to forget he was not taking a walk down Fleet Street. He interviewed the chiefs in their fastnesses, the cottagers in their crofts. He broke rye-bread with the shepherd, ate haggis and porridge with the peasant, and drank a gill of whisky to see 'what makes a Scotchman happy.' Behind him he left his dish of tea, and the pet pork that made the veins of his forehead swell with ecstasy. But to-day the dinner-gong resounds where Rob Boy's bugle blared, and you may sit behind your serviette
Where the sun his beacon red
Kindles on Ben Voirlich's head,
or where the monument of a Gaelic poet broods above the heather. The tyranny of the table-
