the real-estate agent. Every necessity, and many luxuries into the bargain, are to be had within its boundaries. It may resemble the Inns of Court in other ways, but it does not, as they do, encourage snobbishness by placing a taboo upon the tradesman. We have our own dairy, our own green-grocer, our own butcher, though out of sympathy with Augustine I do my marketing in Soho. At one corner our tobacconist keeps his shop, at another our tailor. If my drains go wrong, I call in the local plumber; when I want a shelf put up or something mended, I send for the local carpenter; I could summon the local builder were I inclined to make a present of alterations or additions to the local landlord. I but step across the street if I am in need of a commissioner of oaths; I go no farther to get my typewriting done. Were my daily paper to fail me, the local gossip of the Quarter would allow me no excuse to complain of dearth of news; the benevolent would exult in the opportunity provided for benevolence by our slums where the flower-girls live; the energetic could walk off their energy in our garden, where the County Council band plays on summer evenings. There is a 'public' for our loungers, and for our friends a hotel the house below the hill, with the dingy yellow walls that are so shiny white as I see them by night, kept from time immemorial by Miss Brown, where the lodger still lights himself to bed by a candle and still eats his meals in a coffee-room, and where Labor Members of Parliament, and South Kensington officials, and people never to be suspected of having discovered the Quarter, are the most frequent guests.

More than this, the Quarter has its own population, so distinct from other Londoners that I am struck by the difference no farther away than the other side of the Strand. Our house

keepers are a species apart, so are our milkmen behind their little carts. Our types are a local growth. Nowhere else in London could I meet anybody in the slightest like the pink-eyed, white-haired, dried up little old man, with a jug in his hand, whom I see daily on his way to or from our publichouse; or like the middle-aged dandy who stares me out of countenance as he saunters homeward in the afternoon, a lily or a chrysanthemum, according to the season, in one hand and a brown-paper bag of buns in the other; or like the splendid old man of military bearing, with well-waxed moustache and well-pointed beard, whose Panama hat in summer and fur-lined cloak in winter have become as much fixtures in the Quarter as our Adam houses or our view of the river, and who spends his days patrolling the terrace in front of our frivolous club or going into it with members he happens to overtake at the front door; where his nights are spent, no native of the Quarter can say.

Nor is any other crowd like our crowd that collects every Sunday evening as St. Martin's bells begin to ring for evening service, that grows larger and larger until streets usually empty are packed solid, and that melts away again before ten. It is made up mostly of youths to whom the cap is as indispensable a symbol of class as the silk hat farther west, and young girls who run to elaborate hair and feathers. They have their conventions which are strictly observed. One is to walk with arms linked; a second, to fill the roadway as well as the pavement, to the despair of taxicabs and cycles endeavoring to toot and ring a passage through; a third, to follow the streets that bound the Quarter on its four sides and never to trespass into others. How the custom originated, I leave it to the historian to decide. It may

go back to the Britons who painted themselves blue, it may be no older than the Romans. All I know with certainty is that the Sunday evening walk is a ceremony of no less obligation for the Quarter than the Sunday morning parade in the Row is for Mayfair.

We are of accord in the Quarter on the subject of its charm, and the advantage of preserving it, though on all other subjects we absolutely disagree and continually fight. I have heard even our postman brag of the beauty of our Terrace and the fame of the architects who built it more than a century and a half ago, though I do not believe that as a rule London postmen could say who built the houses where they deliver their letters, or that it would occur to them to pose as judges of architecture. Because we love the Quarter we watch over it with unceasing vigilance. We are always on the look-out for nuisances, and alert to suppress them. In fact, if not in name, we constitute a sort of League for the Prevention of Dirt and Disorder in the Quarter.

There is a distinct understanding that, in an emergency, we may rely upon each other for mutual support, which is the easier as we all have the same Landlord and can make the same Agent's life a martyrdom until the evil is remedied. The one thing we guard most zealously is the quiet, the calm, conducive to work. We wage war to the death against street noises of every kind. No ‘German Band' would be allowed to invade our silent precincts. The hurdygurdy is anathema; I have always thought the Suffragettes' attempt to play it through our streets their bravest deed. If we endure the bell of the muffin-man on Sunday and the song of the man who wants us to buy his sweet lavender, it is because both have the sanction of age.

We make no other concession, and our severity extends to the native no less than to the alien. When, in the strip of green and gravel below my windows, the members of our frivolous club took to shooting themselves with blank cartridges in the intervals of fencing, though the noise was on the same miniature scale as their rifles, we overwhelmed the unfortunate Agent with letters until a stop was put to it. When our Territorials, in their first ardor, chose our catacombs for their evening bugle-practice, we rose as one against them. Beggars, unless they ring boldly at our front doors and pretend to be something else, must give up hope when they enter the Quarter. For if the philosopher thinks angels and men are in no danger from charity, we do not, least of all the lady opposite, to whom almsgiving in our street is as intolerable as donkeys on the green were to Betsy Trotwood. One of my friends has never dared to come to see me, except by stealth, since the day she pounced upon him to ask what he meant by such an exhibition of immorality when all he had done was to drop a few pennies into the hand of a small boy at his cab-door, and all he had meant was a kindly fellow feeling, having once been a small boy himself.

We defend the beauty of the Quarter with equal zeal. We do what we can to preserve the superannuated look which to us is a large part of its charm, and we cry out against every new house that threatens discord in our ancient harmony. Excitement never raged so high among us as when the opposite river banks were desecrated by the advertiser, and from shores hitherto but a dark shadow in the shadowy night, there flamed forth a horrid tout for Tea. We had endured much from a sign of Whiskey farther down the river,

Whiskey and Tea are Great Brit

ain's bulwarks, - but this was worse, for it flared and glared right into our faces, and the vile letters, which were red and green one second and yellow the next, ran in a long line from top to bottom of the high shot-tower. In this crude light, our breweries ceased to be palaces in the night, our campanili again became chimneys. Gone was our 'Fairyland,' gone our 'River of Dreams.' The falling of twilight gave a hideous jog to our memory, and would not let us forget that we lived in a nation of shopkeepers. The Socialist, part of whose stock-in-trade is perversity, liked it, or said he did; but the

other tenants were outraged, and an indignation meeting was called. Four attended, together with the Solicitor and the Surveyor of the estate, and the Publisher, who took the chair. It was of no use. We learned that our nerves might be shattered and our eyes offended, that our joy in the miracle of night might be destroyed forever, but if we could prove no physical harm, legal redress would be denied to us, and our defiance of the Vandal must be in vain. And so there the disgraceful advertisement remains, flaring and glaring defiance at us from across the river, the one serpent in our paradise.

PECKHAM, with his wife and Miss Mellish, was walking along the shore, calling Miss Mellish's attention to the rock-structure of the coast, watching with his restless eye for marine specimens at the margin of the water.

Mrs. Peckham could not feel any great enthusiasm for kelp or sea-lettuce, hermit-crabs, or limpets; but Miss Mellish, in her room at the hotel, had a comprehensive collection of stones and shells which Peckham had gathered for her, and which she intended to utilize in an illustrated lecture to her pupils in Troy after her return in the

autumn.

The brisk breeze, as Peckham had been at pains to ascertain, was blowing straight from Brazil; the white sails of catboats dotted the water, which shimmered, the tenderest of blues; farther out to sea, a string of black coalbarges moved slowly to the westward.

'Ah!' Peckham exclaimed suddenly, his eye having caught sight of a bit of treasure. A finger-sponge!'

He sprang nimbly forward to get the treasure, and Miss Mellish in her cagerness half followed him.

'Look out!' he cried. 'You'll get wet!'

His agility saved him from the wave that rolled in larger than its fellows, and Miss Mellish also saved herself from the threatened catastrophe, lifting her skirt a trifle with a motion that was precipitate but maidenly.

Mrs. Peckham indulgently waited while this little comedy played itself out, and then walked on with her com

panions, who had become absorbed in the curious structure of the sponge.

Mrs. Peckham, in her dress, was pleasantly addicted to soft fabrics and cool colors. She had put on a little middle-aged plumpness; but, aside from that, the years had dealt lightly with her. There were but few threads of gray in the brown hair that curled above her forehead; her comfortable face had become fuller, her features less delicate with the passage of time. Miss Mellish's features, on the contrary, had become more delicate as the years passed. She retained the girlish air which maiden ladies often retain all their lives long. She carried herself very erect, looked whomever she talked with straight in the eye with her earnest gray eyes, and walked with a business-like briskness that contrasted strongly with Mrs. Peckham's indolent motions. Peckham, himself, was nothing but briskness from top to toe. There was not an ounce of superfluous flesh in his anatomy; his fifty years had not brought him a single gray hair. At the present moment, the youthfulness of his appearance was increased by his gray flannels and his outing shirt with a flowing tie; the sea-tan on his lean face heightened the blue of his eyes.

The three had been intimate friends in their early days in Troy, although they had not seen as much of each other afterwards as they always said they wanted to. In fact, away back in Troy, it had been a question with Peckham which one to ask to share his name. Possibly the election had fallen

to Clara because it was easy, somehow, to tell her that he loved her. Emma Mellish was the kind of girl it would be hard to tell a thing like that to. Evidently other men had experienced the same difficulty that Peckham had experienced.

Never having told his love, it had the charm of the unexpressed; the memory of his early attachment was sweetly sad, like a pale, pathetic ghost; but during the present sojourn, the ghost, to Peckham's vague disquiet, had assumed something of the hue of life. Emma's old attraction for him seemed to have come back; and although the relation was absolutely tacit, Miss Mellish was perfectly aware of it, and Mrs. Peckham felt it the most keenly of them all.

Toward many things Miss Mellish's attitude was tacit; she felt rather than thought that Clara Peckham, through her absorption in domestic duties, had missed the higher things of life, and had rendered herself incapable of meeting her husband on the intellectual plane where he was happiest and most at home; and Mrs. Peckham, on the other hand, pitied Emma for her state of single-blessedness and for the necessity that had driven her to teaching school, little dreaming that moulding immature minds was the most fascinating interest in Emma Mellish's life.

Peckham's attitude toward everything was of a masculine simplicity. He was devoted to his business, the manufacture of a smoke-consuming device of his own invention, which had prospered beyond his fondest hopes; he loved his three daughters and his one son, who, in obedience to the universal instinct to scatter, were now enjoying the summer in four separate watering-places, unconsciously seeking their mates; he loved his home; and, until the visit to Eastport Harbor, he had thought that he loved his wife.

His existence in the city had fallen into a routine which delighted his orderly mind. All day he was busy at his factory in lower Manhattan, inventing improvements in his smoke-consuming device, experimenting with recalcitrant fuels, watching his sales grow. Every evening he spent in his oldfashioned house on Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, reading scientific books or the Brooklyn Eagle, unless his wife and he attended a symphony concert at the new Academy of Music or listened to a lecture of the Brooklyn Institute. Peckham preferred the Brooklyn Institute lectures; and Mrs. Peckham preferred the symphony concerts; but, as good Brooklynites, they attended both.

This routine was broken by Mrs. Peckham herself. The children, having grown up and dispersed for the summer with the friends of their generation, left Mrs. Peckham to concentrate the expression of her maternal instinct on her husband. She said he was getting thin and wearing himself out in his business; she insisted that he take a long vacation; and Miss Mellish having mentioned in a letter that she purposed spending the summer at a charming resort in a corner of the Massachusetts coast, the Peckhams joined her at Eastport Harbor.

Peckham found the enforced idleness of the place the hardest work he had ever done. The life led by his fellow guests at the hotel perplexed him; it seemed to have no meaning. Neither Miss Mellish nor his wife nor himself were sea-bathers or dancers; but Mrs. Peckham was placidly content to sit on the veranda, talking and tatting with other ladies similarly engaged; and Emma Mellish found great enjoyment and inspiration in long walks amid the wide, wonderful spaces of sea and sky.

She was very fond of landscapes; and the hand that did n't hold her para