There is no hope for Gretna. Springfield was and is the great glory of its inhabitants. Here ran the great wall of Adrian, the scene of many a tough fight in the days of stone weapons and skin-clad Picts. The Debatable Land, sung by Trouvere and Troubadour, is to-day but a sodden moss, in which no King Arthur strides fearfully away from the "grim lady" of the bogs; and moss-troopers, grim and gaunt and terrible, no longer whirl with lighted firebrands into England. With a thousand stars the placid moon lies long drawn out and drowned at the bottom of the Solway, without a lovesick maid to shed a tear; the chariots that once rattled and flashed along the now silent road were turned into firewood decades ago, and the runaways, from a Prince of Capua to a beggar-maid, are rotten and forgotten. MY FAVORITE AUTHORESS. Just out of the four-mile radius--to give the cabby his chance--is a sleepy lane, lent by the country to the town, and we have only to open a little gate off it to find ourselves in an old-fashioned garden. The house, with its many quaint windows, across which evergreens spread their open fingers as a child makes believe to shroud his eyes, has a literary look--at least, so it seems to me, but perhaps this is because I know the authoress who is at this moment advancing down the walk to meet me. She has hastily laid aside her hoop, and crosses the grass with the dignity that becomes a woman of letters. Her hair falls over her forehead in an attractive way, and she is just the proper height for an authoress. The face, so open that one can watch the process of thinking out a new novel in it, from start to finish, is at times a little careworn, as if it found the world weighty, but at present there is a gracious smile on it, and she greets me heartily with one hand, while the other strays to her neck, to make sure that her lace collar is lying nicely. It would be idle to pretend that she is much more than eight years old, "but then Maurice is only six." Like most literary people who put their friends into books, she is very modest, and it never seems to strike her that I would come all this way to see her. "Mamma is out," she says simply, "but she will be back soon; and papa is at a meeting, but he will be back soon, too." I know what meeting her papa is at. He is crazed with admiration for Stanley, and can speak of nothing but the Emin Relief Expedition. While he is away proposing that Stanley should get the freedom of Hampstead, now is my opportunity to interview the authoress. "Won't you come into the house?" I accompany the authoress to the house, while we chat pleasantly on literary topics. "Oh, there is Maurice, silly boy!" Maurice is too busy shooting arrows into the next garden to pay much attention to me; and the authoress smiles at him good-naturedly. "I hope you'll stay to dinner," he says to me, "because then we'll have two kinds of pudding."