the way of a leap with a male friend, or a hand-in-hand run with a female one, and so on, if you like. And this you can only do in October. Be so good as to remember that I mean all through October as a type. October may not always be 'itself,' and you may get what I call October days in March, or August, or December. But October is the type, and I say it's the time for walking.

And then the light! What an honest, mellow, wise, picturesque light it is! It has in it the result of various experiments in light. It is the proverb of lights-its concentrated wisdom. The art of giving a full, round sun, without defying your gaze and punishing you; clouds which are not crape or wadding; a rich, carefully-coloured sky, under which, nevertheless, you can see, and not wink or squint at the objects around; a haze which is not steam or fog, a glow which is not glare, a toning which is not obscurity, strength which is not coarse, and softness which is not feeble, is not to be acquired in a day, and therefore the other months are not to be blamed for what they cannot help. Neither are the foreign schools of landscape-painting, which are giving way before the English. If they have not an English October, how can they paint as if they had? October makes one charitable even towards foreign schools, towards perils past, hot weather, and immature, inexperienced months. It is a mantle in which you take wellbalanced, rounded, stereoscopic views of things. If I were a Quaker I should prefer to meet Baron Bramwell in October.

People say London is 'empty' in October. Now an 'empty' London has its charms. Once in a way Rotten Row, Regent Street, the Drawing Rooms, et hoc genus omne, are pleasant stimulants, and one sees and enjoys and learns a great deal in connection therewith.

But those

for whom they are a definition of London do not know what London is. The eloquence of London is sometimes greatest when it is unadorned-when it speaks with an average, level tone, relieved for a

time of its richer tropes and figures; when it wears the quiet grandeur of its ferial days,' as the ritualists would call them, the lone Londoner likes to feel how much London can do without. Kensington Gardens seem more like his baronial property; the classic quarters of the town more classic; the Temple suggests dignity and leisure. We can remember the knights better than when the lane is thronged by bags of 'refreshers.' Wolsey might have been shampooed at Honey and Skelton's; the voice of Johnson and Goldsmith can be more than 'part heard;' a hundred black doors inscribed Attendance from 10 to 1' (i.e. from ten minutes to one) are eloquent of the long.' And then on Sundays you anticipate posterity, and hear, in a curatic state, all the future bishops and deans.

The pleasures of October do not disappear with daylight. The October evening is one of its best features. Having had in the day all the best of what summer has to give, you have at night the best of winter's qualities-his evening at home. You can have a fire if you like, and if you do not you need not. Coming home in the early October evening is one of the pleasantest of human things. In the country you see the sunset as you come; and as it gently melts into what is night in the better meanings only of the word, the sense that you need not keep on working because it still seems day, and that you need not go to bed, since, after all, it is not night, is very delightful. The moon rises, and you do not shrink from her gaze as though you ought to be asleep; she seems to rise in a quiet, domestic manner, as though Nature, having got the children to bed, had lit her moderator and sat down to her tatting. And in town, as you draw towards home, and the lamps light one by one, a pleasant home feeling settles upon you, a feeling as of a general condition of parlour, a general drawing of curtains and lighting of lamps, a sense of tea and toast, an appreciative perception of the fitness of things.

Then, too, is the season for that

pleasant interval known in feminine language as 'between the lights.' Then, and not in winter, where Cowper puts it,

has fancy, ludicrous and wild, Soothed with awaking dream of houses, towers, Trees, churches, and strange visages, expressed In the red cinders, while with poring eyes We gazed, ourselves creating what we saw.'

Not in winter, for then it comes too early for tea to follow or precede, and tea, not work, is the thing just after the parlour twilight.' The quiet talk with the fire and the shadows does us good. They talk with us of Octobers gone and Octobers coming, and amongst others of the October of our days, the season which, if it follow a working spring and an honest, busy summer, may be as calm and as pleasant as any part of our days. You and I, my good friend, who are toiling in June

or July, may even be reconciled to the toning down which is to come by the thought of our October, with its promise of garnered deeds, enriched landscapes, soft lights, and tea time. A day's work done, and yet a capacity for an evening's work to come, if need be; the leaves of life old enough to be golden, but not old enough to fall; with the nerve and freshness which so often come as in the October days, when the premature weariness and wornoutedness of the laborious summer have gone-it must be a pleasant experience. Some human Öctobers indeed are sadder-wet with tears, despoiled of treasures, chill with early winter; but many are of the truer type. So may ours be, my friend. Let us sit and think together, gravely but not gloomily, and let us interpret the forms we find in the fire into images of hope.

HE curtain rises on an exces

dining-room of a house that ranks midway between farm homestead and country mansion, and that consequently, after the manner of such houses, combines the comforts of the one with many of the luxuries of the other.

At the head of the table an elderly lady is seated. She is engaged in carving a chicken, and pressing a 'bit of the breast, or a wing, say,' simultaneously upon every other member of the company; which consists, firstly, of her eldest

daughter-to give due precedence to the ladies-Miss Prescott, known as 'Di' to her intimates, by reason of her god-parents having, in a thoughtless hour, elected to name her Dinah.' The supper which graces the table is in celebration

of the return of this young lady from a six-weeks' sojourn in the great metropolis.

While Di is appeasing her hunger, and before I pass on to her sister and brothers, I will describe her to you. The moment of assuaging the appetite has been declared by divers great authorities (Byron amongst the number) to be an unfortunate one as far as a woman's appearance goes. If this be a fact, it certainly is an unfortunate one; for in these latter days we are not ethereal creatures that can live upon air, and love, and the like intangibilities; we must eat, and eat frequently; and if we are unprepossessing while doing so, woe be to us.

If we are unprepossessing: but I utterly deny the implication. In defiance, therefore, of poetical prejudice, I will select this unpropitious