if he could play Bridge." 

 "Anthony is an excellent fellow," I said. 

 Mr. Ellicomb is a young man of High Church principles and artistic tastes who has taken an old Tudor farmhouse in the neighbourhood, and has furnished it very well. He waxes eloquent on the monstrous inelegance of modern dress, and the decadence of Japanese art, and he says he would rather sit in the dark than burn gas in his house, and he dusts his own blue china himself. In his house it is a sign of art to divert anything from its proper use, and to use it for another purpose than that for which it was originally intended.  Poor Ellicomb uses a cabbage-strainer as a fern-pot, a drain-tile for an umbrella-stand, his mother's old lace veils as antimacassars, bed-posts as palm-stands, a linen press as a book-case, and a brass spittoon for growing lilies. It is almost like playing at guessing riddles to go over his house with him, and to try and discover for what purpose some of his things were originally created. Their conversion to another use is, I am sure, a very high form of art. 

 "There are the Jamiesons," said my sister, as we sat in the hall ready to receive our guests. 

 It does not require any occult power to sit indoors and to be able to distinguish the Jamiesons' carriage-wheels from those of the other arrivals, for the Jamiesons have, as usual, employed the "six-fifty" bus on its return journey from the station to set them down at our gate. It is quite a subject of interest with our neighbours to find themselves fellow-passengers with the young ladies, in their black skirts and their more dressy style of bodice concealed beneath tweed capes. And it generally gets about in Stowel circles before the evening is over, or certainly soon after the morning shopping has begun, that the Miss Jamiesons have been dining at such or such a house. Even the bus conductor has a sympathetic way of handing the young ladies into his conveyance when they are going out to dinner, and he fetches a wisp of straw and wipes down the step if the night is wet. 

 Mr. Ward piloted the independent Kate up the short carriage-drive with quite an affectionate air of solicitude, frequently inquiring of her if she did not feel her feet a little damp; and Kate answered cheerfully and kindly, feeling, no doubt, that this sort of fussing was one of the drawbacks of prospective matrimony, but that it was only right to accept the little attentions in the spirit in which they were made. The Pirate Boy, who followed with his sister Maud, begged her to take his arm in a 

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