country set with 'cycles as the fields with flowers or the sky with
stars.

For reasons equally good, we were not boatists, although the watery way
from Oxford to the sea flowed so near our door, and our village was one
of the gayest head-quarters not only of the fresh-water navy, whose arms
are flashing oars and whose oaths are of the universities, but equally
that of regiments of painters, whose arms are sketching-umbrellas and
easels and who swear not at all,--or at least not to feminine hearing.

Our lodgings were among the artists in the region farther back from the
river than that monopolized by the boating-people. We were back among
the sunny slopes and smiling meadows, the red-tiled farm-houses and
dusky lanes, of the still primitive natives of the region, while the
navy covered the shining river by day and overran the river-side
hostelries by night.

Our lodgings were not picturesque, if truth must be told, although
surrounded by picturesqueness as by a garment,--a circular cloak of it,
so to say. We had the chief rooms of a staring new and square brick
cottage, glaring with white walls inside, shutterless outside, majestic
with a bow-window too high to look from except upon one's legs, owned by
my Lady H----'s gardener, and elegantly named "Ethel Cottage," as a
stucco plaque in its frieze bore witness. We should have preferred
accommodations in any of the ivy-grown, steep-roofed cots about us, or
in the old stone inn, with its peaked porch, where honest yokels quaffed
nutty ale and a sign-board creaked and groaned from its gibbet across
the road. But we had come too late in the painting-season for any other
than Hobson's choice: the tidbits of grime and squalor were all taken,
and we must e'en content ourselves to be mocked and reviled for the