them for beaten paths, level walks, and campstools, to matted underwood and rock scaling.

The young gentlemen advantageously improved seemly opportunities of exhibiting their stores of anecdote, and of startling with apt repartee. An adequate supply, too, of poetic fervour was at hand, always ready for immediate use, whenever the straggling bands of voluntary itinerants fell in with rills or flowers convenient for its introduction. Enthusiasm for the "beauties of nature" poured itself forth in laudable streams as often as breaks in the wood, or the summit of a rising ground, opened prospects justifying rapture. Verses and stanzas, descriptive and sentimental, were whispered in melodious tones, or pronounced with lofty emphasis, whenever quotation chanced to be more appropriate or more easy than original remark. In fact, the usual and approved routine on such occasions was closely followed by the many with the usual happy result.

In the course of the morning's rambling, the party, desirous of emulating the delights and abandon of gipsy life, naturally separated into different groups. Dilettanti botanists loi

tered in the copse in quest of bee orchises and fungi. Dilettanti geologists deposited in wallets, for the purpose, specimens of the rock, whose fragments gave firmness to the carriage roads. Dilettanti students of entomology wandered far over the grass in pursuit of butterflies and grashoppers, unscientifically averse to capture and death, although destined to the embalment and brief immortality of a glazed and camphored sarcophagus in the collector's cabinet.

Alice Windermere accompanied her friend Constance; and Albert Grey, ever more like a lover than a brother, did not leave his sister's side. Having escaped the many, they were seeking the height of Pennersley Crag,—a spot too distant and of too difficult approach for all, save those whose spirits delighted to bathe in the enchantment of scenery. These are always few; and all but the three had dropped away in different pursuits, or on the plea of probable fatigue.

Lady Windermere proved a prophetess to herself. The day was to her a livelong day of martyrdom. No marquess, no earl, was there

to justify the proceeding by the sanction of his presence. Not even a viscount, in his own right, accompanied the widow of the baronet. Lord Percy Huron, the Marquess of Byborough's second son, and his volatile brother, Lord John, were of the party; but they bestowed their chief attentions elsewhere. They principally devoted themselves to Adelaide and Honoria Smith, - Mr. Auget's nieces; the younger, for the sake of collecting jocose anecdotes, to be afterwards retailed in his lordship's own humorous manner, for the amusement of more refined society; Lord Percy, from a desire to contribute his share to the general enjoyment of the day, and a melancholy conviction that where alone his heart was, his presence might cause pain. He would have been with Constance.

Old Lord Dumbledore, the great agriculturist, had, to Lady Windermere's marvel, actually selected as his twin for the day, the parvenu Mr. Auget; and with that gentleman had proceeded across the fields to Farmer Peter's domain, in order that he might, on the spot, be made to comprehend, with his own ears, an

explanation of the farmer's new method of folding sheep; and that, with his own eyes, he might behold its efficiency.

Lady Windermere found herself thus forsaken-abandoned to the mercy of Mrs. Auget, —a lady who had pounced upon her on her first arrival at the rendezvous, and had never since, for a moment, been seduced or hinted away. Beneath the "odious old oak," under whose canopy the stragglers, when reassembled, were to take their rustic refection of recherché viands and iced champagne, sat the ill-sorted pair.

The several members of the gipsy party were not exactly what Mrs. Auget repeatedly declared them to be-"perfectly homogeneous." Certain elements of incongruity developed themselves, at least to the discriminating eye of Lady Windermere. If her ladyship did not take the trouble of openly differing with Mrs. Auget upon the point, her silence did not by any means prove agreement in opinion. To sanction familiar discussion with so different a person, by open dissent in a matter of mere individual apprehension, would have been to sin agaiust

the first article of her ladyship's social religion. Mrs. Auget, moreover, did use such extraordinary phraseology, and employ such very learned words, that one might be excused troubling oneself with regard to their exact import.

But Mrs. Auget severely tested Lady Windermere's equable tolerance towards the "other sort of people," as being far below her ladyship's estimate of the average of that distinct genus. The heiress of a tradesman, however rich, might hope for no clemency from the widow of a baronet, however poor. Formerly all trades and professions, practised as means of subsistence, had been regarded by her ladyship as constituting one and the same mass, confounded into what geologists would call a heavy conglomerate. The merchant was but a more thriving chandler, and the physician differed but in fees from the barber-dentist; they were equally "other sort of people." But when, by a malicious manoeuvre of destiny, Lady Windermere encountered the iron-merchant's wealthy daughter in fashionable society, a peculiar atrocity seemed attached to the iron trade. In fact, "the iron had entered her soul."