the rosy rustics are standing, decently and deferentially, to watch the arrival of the smarter contingent. This party takes its place in a great square pew, as large as a small room, and with seats all round, and while he listens to the respectable intonings the sympathetic stranger reads over the inscriptions on the mural tablets before him, all to the honour of the earlier bearers of a name which is, for himself, a symbol of hospitality. When I came back to the parsonage the entertainment had been transferred to the interior, and I had occasion to admire the maidenly vigour of all the nice girls who, after playing lawn-tennis all the afternoon, were modestly expecting to dance all the evening. And in regard to this it is not impertinent to say that from almost any group of young English creatures of this order—though preferably from such as have passed their lives in quiet country homes—an American receives a delightful impression of something that he may describe as an intimate salubrity. He notices face after face in which this rosy absence of a morbid strain—this simple, natural, affectionate development—amounts to positive beauty. If the young lady have no other beauty the air I speak of is a charm in itself; but when it is united, as it so often is, to real perfection of feature and colour the result is the most delightful thing in nature. It makes the highest type of English beauty, and to my sense there is nothing so satisfyingly high as that. Not long since I heard a clever foreigner indulge, in conversation with an English lady,—a very wise and liberal woman,—in a little lightly restrictive criticism of her countrywomen. “It is possible,” she answered, in regard to one of his objections; “but such as they are, they are inexpressibly dear to their husbands.” This is doubtless true of good wives all over the world; but I felt, as I listened to these words of my friend, that there is often something in an English girl-face which gives it an extra touch of _justesse_. Such as the woman is, she has here, more than elsewhere, the look of being completely and profoundly, without reservations for other uses, at the service of the man she loves. This look, after one has been a while in England, comes to seem so much a proper and indispensable part of a “nice” face, that the absence of it appears a sign of irritability or of shallowness. Latent responsiveness to the manly appeal—that is what it means; which one must take as a very comfortable meaning.