glimpses of strange beasts, the dangers of flood and field, the
hair's-breadth escapes, and the sufferings (oh, the sufferings too! I
have no doubt of the sufferings) of the traveller being carefully kept
out; no shady spot, no fruitful plant being ever mentioned either; so
that the whole performance looks like a mere feat of agility on the
part of a trained pen running in a desert. A cruel spectacle--a most
deplorable adventure. "Life," in the words of an immortal thinker of,
I should say, bucolic origin, but whose perishable name is lost to the
worship of posterity--"life is not all beer and skittles." Neither
is the writing of novels. It isn't really. Je vous donne ma parole
d'honneur that it--is--not. Not all. I am thus emphatic because some
years ago, I remember, the daughter of a general. . .

Sudden revelations of the profane world must have come now and then
to hermits in their cells, to the cloistered monks of Middle Ages, to
lonely sages, men of science, reformers; the revelations of the world's
superficial judgment, shocking to the souls concentrated upon their
own bitter labour in the cause of sanctity, or of knowledge, or of
temperance, let us say, or of art, if only the art of cracking jokes
or playing the flute. And thus this general's daughter came to me--or I
should say one of the general's daughters did. There were three of
these bachelor ladies, of nicely graduated ages, who held a neighbouring
farmhouse in a united and more or less military occupation. The eldest
warred against the decay of manners in the village children, and
executed frontal attacks upon the village mothers for the conquest of
curtseys. It sounds futile, but it was really a war for an idea. The
second skirmished and scouted all over the country; and it was that one
who pushed a reconnaissance right to my very table--I mean the one who
wore stand-up collars. She was really calling upon my wife in the
soft spirit of afternoon friendliness, but with her usual martial