It has struck me often enough of late that, for an artistic and literary colony, ours is not very acute. For it is a sad and undeniable fact that, now the Carvilles are gone away to live on Staten Island, they seem to have ceased to exist as far as Netley is concerned. We alone seem to have attained to some small knowledge of Mr. Carville's peculiar record and essentially individual philosophy. We alone know the relationship with the celebrated and unfortunate Icarus who achieved international fame by crossing the Atlantic, only to crash to earth, as so often happens, in a comparatively trivial enterprise. Mr. Carville and his family never became the talk of the country club. They roused no interest at the soda-counter of Pakenham's drug-store or in the room behind the bar of Slovitzsky's Hotel on Chestnut Street. Our literary club makes no mention in its List of Authors who have lived in Netley, of Mr. Carville and his _Cameos of the Sea_. Happy the nations who have no history, they say, and no doubt the aphorism may be applied to families as well. Certainly, if Mr. Carville proposed, as no doubt he did, that his family should attain to felicity by a profound obscurity, he has attained his desire. It is left for Time to show whether Benvenuto Cellini and Giuseppe Mazzini, when they grow up, will emerge from that obscurity and astonish the world with some novel manifestations of the family genius. But this is to anticipate. The immediate point is that none of our neighbours--not even our own friends, like Williams nor Eckhardt, nor Wederslen nor Confield, which last has a sort of vested interest in Europe which is attested by his much-travelled bag--had any inkling of the story to which they saw us listening as they passed our porch on certain afternoons that fall. How little does Mrs. Wederslen think, for example, that her surmise about the burnt aeroplane was grotesquely wrong! How little does Williams, when he brings us his water-colours, done in that fall-vacation at Bar Harbor, appreciate at its real value our etching of an aeroplane lying across an English hedgerow! Even Miss Fraenkel, I think, has no clear knowledge of Mrs. Carville's part in the tragedy of that New Year's Night. I remarked early in this narrative that Miss Fraenkel's importance in it was of the slightest. Her charming enthusiasm was ever an ignis fatuus leading her into unprofitable bye-ways of conjecture. We have, therefore, the superior position as regards the vanished family who lived next door. We know, as I have said, where they are gone; but we do not tell. It gives us a certain rare aesthetic pleasure to keep our own counsel.