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Bailiff's Daughter."You understand me better than usual, in fact to perfection."

He dismounts and strides to the back of the cart, lifts the covers, seizes the rabbits, flings some silver contemptuously in the basket and looks about him for a place to bury his bargain. A small boy approaching in

The Gadabout Hen.-Page 98.

the far distance will probably bag the game.

Bailiff's Daughter (modestly)."Thanks for your trade, sir, rather ungraciously bestowed, and we 'opes for a continuance of your past fyvors.'

True Love (leaning on the wheel of the trap)." Let us stop this nonsense. What did you hope to gain by running away?"

Bailiff's Daughter.-" Distance and absence."

True Love. -"You knew you couldn't prevent my offering myself to you sometime or other."

Bailiff's Daughter." Perhaps not; but I could at least defer it, couldn't I?" True Love." Why postpone the inevitable?"

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Did I succeed?"

True Love.-"No, you failed utterly." Bailiff's Daughter (secretly piqued).— "Then I am glad I tried it."

True Love.-"You couldn't succeed be

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Bailiff's Daughter.-"I confess I don't see the necessity."

True Love (morosely).-"You're the sort of woman men won't leave in undisturbed spinsterhood; they'll keep on badgering you."

Bailiff's Daughter.-" Oh, I don't mind the badgering of a number of men; it's rather nice. It's the one badger I find obnoxious."

True Love (impatiently).-"That's just the perversity of things. I could put a stop to the protestations of the many; I should like nothing better-but the pertinacity of the one! Ah, well! I can't drop that without putting an end to my

existence !"

couldn't ask me anything seriously that I wouldn't do, dear Mistress Perversity."

Bailiff's Daughter (yielding a point). "I'll put that boldly to the proof. Say you don't love me!

True Love (seizing his advantage).-"I don't! It's imbecile and besotted devotion! Tell me, when may I come to take you away ? ""

Bailiff's Daughter (sighing).-"It's like asking me to leave Heaven."

True Love.-"I know it; she told me where to find you, but you could never leave heaven, you are always carrying it along with you. All you would have to do is to admit me ; heaven is full of twos. If you can't be happy without poultry, why that is a wish easily gratified. I'll get you a farm to-morrow; no, it's Saturday and the

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real estate offices close at noon, but on Monday, without fail. Your ducks and geese shall swim on a crystal lake Phoebe told me what a genius you have for getting them out of the muddy pond; she was sitting beside it when I called, her hand in that of a straw - colored person named Gladwish and the ground in her vicinity completely strewn with votive offerings. You shall splash your silver sea with an ivory wand; your hens shall have suburban cottages, each with its garden; their perches shall be of satin-wood and their water dishes of motherof-pearl. You shall be the Goose Girl and I will be the Swan Herd -simply to be near you, for I hate live poultry. Dost like the picture? It's a little like Claude Melnotte's, I confess. The fact is I am not quite sane; talking with you after a fortnight of the tabbies at the Hydro is like quaffing inebriating vodka after Health's food! May I come to-morrow?"

Bailiff's Daughter (hedging)."I shall be rather busy; the Crossed Minorca hen comes off to-morrow."

True Love." Oh, never mind!

I'll take her off to-night when I escort you to the farm; then she'll get a day's advantage."

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Phoebe and Gladwish.

Bailiff's Daughter.-" And rob four teen prospective chicks of a mother; nay, lose the chicks themselves? Never!"

True Love." So long as you are a Goose Girl does it make any difference whose you are? Is it any more agreeable to be Mrs. Heaven's Goose Girl than mine ?

Bailiff's Daughter.—“Ah! but in one case the term of service is limited; in the other, permanent."

True Love." But in the one case you are the slave of the employer, in the other the employer of the slave. Why did you run away?

Bailiff's Daughter.-"A man's mind is too dull an instrument to measure a woman's reason; even my own fails some

times to deal with all its delicate shades; but I think I must have run away chiefly to taste the pleasure of being pursued and brought back. If it is necessary to your happiness that you should explore all the Bluebeard chambers of my being, I will confess further that it has taken you nearly three weeks to accomplish what I supposed you would do in three days!

True Love (after a well-spent interval). "To-morrow then; shall we say before breakfast ? Ah, do! Why not? Well then, immediately after breakfast, and I breakfast at seven nowadays and sometimes earlier. Do take off those ugly cotton gloves, dear; they are five sizes too large for you and so rough and baggy to the touch!"

The creature was well mounted. -Page 99.

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By W. C. Brownell

OW different in a critical aspect from its condition when Arnold began to write is the England of our day -England and its literary dependency, ourselves! And how largely the difference is due to the influence of Arnold's writings! Thirty years ago he was deemed a dandy and a dilettante in literature. To-day his paradoxes are become accepted commonplaces. No writer, probably, ever passed so quickly from unpopularity through fame to comparative neglect; and this not because he illustrated the passing phase of popular thought and feeling, to which on the contrary he was generally in antagonism, but because his victory over philistinism was so prompt and his " bruisèd arms" were so soon hung up for monuments." Was there ever a time, one asks one's self, when Anglo-Saxon critical taste was truculent; when measure and restraint were viewed with contempt, and mere erudition with reverence; when rhetoric as such was admired; when rhodomontade and fustian were tolerated nominis umbra; when "curiosity" was discountenanced and disinterestedness despised; when poise, good temper, politeness were negligible; when "allowing one's consciousness to play freely" was a meaningless rather than a trite phrase; when, in a word, Arnold's various deductions from his cardinal tenet of the value of culture seemed insubstantial and trivial? Yet to nine out of every ten of its comparatively few readers, when "Essays in Criticism" was first published, such a phrase as "How trenchant that is, but how perfectly unscrupulous," in characterization of Mr. Kinglake's rhetoric, was probably a complete revelation. There is, then, we said to ourselves, such a thing as rectitude. outside the sphere of morals, and for us the point of view itself of criticism suddenly shifted. Who now, except in wilful indulgence, enjoys what used to be admired as 66 'prose poetry"? Yet at the time I speak of who was there that was not slightly puzzled by such a statement as: "All the critic could pos

sibly suggest in the way of objection would be perhaps that Mr. Ruskin is there trying to make prose do more than it can perfectly do; that what he is there attempting he will never, except in poetry, be able to accomplish to his entire satisfaction ?" Of course, our practice has not made the same progress as our principles. Practice is largely a matter of temperament, and the Anglo-Saxon temperament a pretty constant quantity. But whatever our practice, our standard would nowadays conform to Arnold's declaration that "the true mode. of intellectual action" is "persuasion, the instilment of conviction." And if one seeks a concrete instance of the great advance made in English critical writing in the past twenty-five years, mainly through the agency of that culture for which Arnold was always contending and in whose triumphs he is surely entitled to share, a very striking one is furnished by the contrast between the state of things at present and that existing when he inquired "Why is all the journeyman-work of literature, as I may call it, so much worse done here than it is in France?"

His work, in short, is there to speak for itself. The poor have the gospel of culture preached to them, and his phrases are now at the end of every current pen. His ambition is no doubt disclosed in the happy lot he predicts for Joubert-“to pass with scant notice through one's own generation, but to be singled out and preserved by the very iconoclasts of the next, then in their turn by those of the next, and so, like the lamp of life itself, to be handed on from one generation to another in safety." But his fate has been to receive abundant notice from his own generation. Doubtless in spite of having been perhaps prematurely disseminated he will be preserved and handed on to Bacon's "next ages." There is certainly enough pollen in his essays to flower successively in many seasons and as long as the considerations to which he consecrated his powers interest readers who care also for clear and charming and truly classic prose. But what I wish to point out is

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