a year; now and then a travelling circus came along; there was a lecture occasionally on an instructive subject, such as chemistry, or astronomy, or sculpture; there were picnics, but these were rare; if there were show places in the neighbourhood, parties were made to them, and tea was festively taken among the ruins of the Abbey. [Illustration: John Galt -JOHN GALT-] Fashion descends slowly; it is now the working man who takes his wife into the country for tea: fifty years ago he took his wife nowhere, and scorned tea. Open-air games and sports there were none; no lawn-tennis, Badminton, or anything of that kind in those days; even croquet, which is now so far lost in the mists of antiquity that men of thirty are too young to remember the rage for it, was actually not yet invented. Archery certainly existed, and the comic writers are always drawing pictures of the young ladies sticking their arrows into the legs of people a hundred feet or so wide of the target. But archery belonged to a class rather above that which we are now considering. There was not much sketching and painting. There was no amateur photography; there was no catching of strange creatures in ponds for the aquarium--a fashion also now happily extinct; there was not, in fact, any single pursuit, amusement, or game which would bring young people together in the open air. There was no travelling; the summer holiday had not yet got down in the country. In London, to be sure, everybody down to Bevis Marks and Simmery Axe went out of town and to the seaside in July or August; but in the country nobody thought of such a thing; not the vicar’s daughters, not the solicitor’s wife, not the family of the general practitioner; the very schoolmaster, who got his four weeks in the summer and his three at Christmas, spent them at home in such joy as accompanies rest from labour. With no outdoor amusements, and with no summer holiday, how much is life simplified! But the simplicity of life means monotony--_faciunt vitam, balnea, vina, Venus_. [Illustration: LA PASTOURELLE]