daughter. These, however, are issues which it is not necessary to pursue. My point is that the French have a genius for domesticity, whereas the English have not. Of course the Micawbers were an exception; but if you take even Dickens, who is a kind of apostle of domesticity, it is, upon the whole, a gloomy idea of the British home that you will gather. And Thackeray's appalling sketch of the Osborne household is scarcely a caricature. The severity of its gloom has been lightened in the last fifty years, but only by increasing the freedom of individuals. Mrs. Clifford, in a clever little sketch among her "Mere Stories," puts the issue from the wife's point of view. Her Mr. Webster is a person very like old Osborne, but he is a rare type now. Mr. Webster will not let his wife decorate her drawing-room according to her own taste; he will not let her friends, least of all, her male friends, come to tea with her; and he insists that the dinners shall be ordered according to his severely British taste, which prefers cod and anchovy sauce followed by a joint, to any more inventive confections. Mrs. Clifford's conclusion is that the wife does wisely and well to run away from him; and it is quite clear that the average man would be very unwise to try Mr. Webster's methods with the average modern woman. Practically it comes to this. For a long time English novelists, who are representative observers, have commented on the tedium of English home-life; and the progress of ideas has greatly lightened that tedium, not by abolishing the heavy silence or mechanical talk which is apt to fall upon a home circle, but by increasing the facilities for escape. All the tendencies of modern English society are in a sense anti-domestic.

It is the woman, not the man, who makes a home, and the modern woman, if she has a home, is surprisingly often

out of it. To begin with, the mere problem of locomotion is enormously simplified for her. Our fathers did not encourage their wives to go abroad; they questioned the propriety of cabs, and drew the line absolutely at omnibuses. Fifty years ago it was still something of an affair for a woman to get anywhere, and she thought twice before she went outside her. own door. Besides, there were not so many reasons for going out. The strongest material link of domesticity is the common table, and in the early days of Her Majesty's reign a woman had to dine either in her own house or with her friends. Restaurants scarcely existed, except for men. Now London is sprinkled with them as from a pepperpot, and there is scarcely one where a sensible man may not take a sensible woman, and plenty where the sensible woman may go by herself, if she wants to. The added freedom makes for the pleasure of mutual intercourse; it is no longer so essential to a man's happiness that his wife should be a good cook, or at least the cause of good cooking in others. He may reasonably consider whether he will not do well to marry some one whom it is amusing to take to the theatre. There is much more chance than there used to be for a husband and wife to shake off domestic ties altogether, whether for an evening or a month. If they live in a flat, the affair becomes simplicity itself; they have only to go away and Islam the door behind them; and this suggests rather an amusing point in the international attitude. Flats came in from France, where every body lives in an appartement; and we used to hear that an Englishman's house was his castle, a shrine of British palladiums, which was being ignominiously abandoned for a somewhat improper arrangement borrowed from the undomestic Continent. Yet, as a matter of fact, the undomestic French live peace

ably in their appartements, and seldom leave them, except to dine with their relatives or relations-in-law, a social duty, whose tyranny is not felt among us; whereas directly the Englishman has got his flat, he is struck by the convenience it offers for getting away from it. The habit of running out of town at the end of the week increases, and few people are content with only one annual holiday from the routine of home life. That is the real attraction of the flat; if you ask your friends why they prefer to live in a section of a barrack, they will nearly always answer that it is so much easier to go away. But with the disappearance of the house as a social institution, the home tends to disappear also. Servants pass more and more into the condition of club-waiters, impersonal machines; and the old retainer becomes a tradition of the past.

Another singularly anti-domestic factor in modern existence is the advent of the bicycle, which not merely tempts people out of doors, when, under old conditions, they would have stayed at home, but opens a vastly wider range of dissipations, even in the country, by its capacity for covering the ground. People are far less limited to their own resources; the number of tennis and croquet parties which they can easily attend is indefinitely increased, and one has only to read Miss Austen to be reminded how unsettling these gaieties may be.

There seems to me nothing alarming in the prospect, and I have no desire to raise the cry of domesticity in danger. What has long happened in the serious concerns of life extends itself to more trivial matters; our families tend to disperse themselves, not merely in pursuit of business, but of pleasure, and by so doing they seem to me to show their sense. The Englishwoman in particular, of the present day, has probably more personal liberty in de

cent society than any kind of woman that has yet been invented, far more than the contemporary American; and one has no quarrel with the result. She has entirely shaken off the feeling, or the affectation, that it is impossible for her to be happy unless she sees with her own eyes daily that her children eat their pudding and do not get their feet wet. Indeed, she is disposed to argue that no one is so much in need of a holiday as the middle-class mother, since her occupation is always with her; no Factory Act comes in to limit her hours of work. I have heard a lady suggest (and it seemed an admirable idea) that one of the ladies' clubs should try the experiment of organizing a large crèche with a competent staff, where members of the club could deposit their children upon reasonable terms when they wanted to go off for a tour with their husbands. Some of the most devoted and admirable mothers prefer to take their holidays entirely by themselves, and vary the routine altogether. As an American lady put it to me the other day, "You get into that state that you'd sooner smell any man's cigar than your husband's." The aspiration is undomestic, but it is a question whether in the end it does not make for happiness that husband and wife should freshen the pleasure in each other's society by occasional spells of absence. Stevenson, perhaps, stated the case in too extreme a form when he said that the ideal husband was a sailor, but he was only exaggerating a truth. French people have not the restlessness in their blood which makes us wanderers, and they are contentedly domestic; but to be domestic out of a sense of duty, and against the grain, ends in boredom, and to be bored is not good for the soul or body of any man or woman. English husbands, I believe, are much more to be envied, since their wives began to discover that the skies would not fall

if they left their households to take care of themselves for a month or six weeks; since the first business of husbands and wives in this world is to be good company for one another, and Macmillan's Magazine.

cheerful parents generally make cheerful children. Let us remember the appalling Mr. Osborne, and rejoice in the change.

Stephen Gwynn.

CHAPTER I.

THE SINGING MASTER.

Dandy and Dandizette lived when this century was only twenty years old, and Dandy's age was exactly the age of the century. Dandizette was three years younger.

Dandy was tall and comely, and, if he had not thought it a part of beauty to dress himself in the manner which won for him his sobriquet, the sun of that time could scarce have shone upon a handsomer fellow.

Besides his good looks, he had a voice that held out promise of his becoming one of the finest singers of that day. His rare voice stood him in good stead, and he was on the road to fame and wealth, when he met Dandizette.

Dandizette was a slender young girl, with a fresh, pretty face, and a sunny wealth of hair. Like Dandy, she dressed at tip-top of the fashion,-this attracting all eyes to her. Sweet modesty thus suffered through the "mode." She was lamentably foolish, in this, again, like her lover. In fact, the thought lies near, that there did not live at that time two more foolish persons than these twain,-until they found their souls.

To begin their story at the beginning, Dandy was engaged to give Dandizette singing lessons.

Dandizette had no voice, but it was no part of her singing master's busi

ness to tell that to her grandmother; and, if it had been, there is every reason to believe that he would have placed pleasure before business, and have pleased himself with observing silence, as he did.

Making no complaint, he was twice a week subjected to what would, with the alteration of one circumstance, have been intolerable martyrdom to him,-to wit, the listening to singing in a high, thin voice which uttered itself in complete independence of the pianoforte accompaniment.

Dandy played that accompaniment with a smile in his fine blue eyes, which was the result of a thought that held him whenever he was with Dandizette, and which turned on the strangeness of the phenomenon that a young girl of such sweet prettiness should emit sounds so unsweet.

"I think, Mr. Smijth"-so Dandy spelt his patronymic-"I shall never be a nightingale!"

So Dandizette said more than once. "I think, Lady Marget" the forename of Dandizette, who was an earl's daughter, was Margaret, and Dandy thus prettified it-"I think, Lady Marget, I could never like a nightingale as well as you."

Dandy did not say that more than once, because, little clever as he was. he was somewhat cleverer than Dandizette, and thus could think of different things to say. Whatever thing he

said always implied that in his deeming Dandizette was, by much, better than a nightingale.

Dandizette believed Dandy, but was so far from minded to let him see that she did, that she said, with what to him was sweet iteration:

"I fear you do not mean that, Mr. Smijth. My grandmamma says that gentleman's talk is commonly wheedles."

Dandizette's grandmamma, who, like the language she used, was sixty years the elder of Dandizette, was present at these lessons, and might have borne out her granddaughter's assertion, or have deprecated it, had she heard it; but the years that were making Mistress Brown-for Dandizette's grandmother had married into the large family of that name-begin to look a-cold and blue, had deadened her organ of hearing, and she heard nothing of what passed between Dandy and Dandizette.

Howbeit, she saw some things.

pher, fainted to hear water splash. 'Twas an antipathy."

"A fiddlestick!"

"Madam, my service to you." So saying Dandy took his leave. As he struck out homewards, it seemed to Dandy that a great cloud was in the sky, whereas, contrariwise, the sun was shining very brightly. Midway in his walk he stopped, and said aloud, "I am half a mind to fall off from this."

He was walking under trees, and there were no other walkers near. Thus Dandy confided to the empty air that he was half resolved not to follow up the advantages which he had so far won with Dandizette.

Meanwhile Mistress Brown was pursuing her inquiries.

"Why, Margaret," she said, "wear you no longer silk?"

Margaret was silent.

Mistress Brown spoke again, using the figure of speech termed a leading question. "Is it," she said, "that Mr. Smijth is of those gentlemen who swoon to touch silk?"

"Ay, madam," replied Dandizette. ""Tis an antipathy."

66

Mistress Brown slowly nodded her head as who should say: "Is it so?"

Dandizette gave a quick nod of her head which said, "Yes," and she added:

"By your leave, madam, Mr. Boyle, the great philosopher, fainted to hear water splash. 'Twas an antipathy."

Mistress Brown for a moment averted a face on which smiles played; then she said gravely:

"So, Margaret, Mr. Smijth has just informed me, and also that you swoon to smell a jonquil. With your antipathies, you are certainly the two persons the most like Mr. Boyle that are now in the world."

The sarcasm was here so pointed that even foolish Dandizette reddened hotly, and fell to playing with what she called her Bath ring. This was a ring