footsore from the unaccustomed flagstones, and care-worn from the effort to utilise the Underground return tickets that an ideally perfect programme had induced us to take in the morning. In addition to these usual cares, another more poignant anxiety fell to our lot. We were lent a Kodak,--for the benefit of the unlearned it may be mentioned that the Kodak is a photographic camera of the kind that is to the ordinary species as a compressed meat lozenge to a round of beef,--and as neither of us knew anything about it, it became necessary to learn its mechanism in a fevered ten minutes, or to leave it behind. Ambition fired us to the attempt, and having adjourned with the Kodak and an instructor to the severely simple scenery of the gardens on the Thames Embankment, we received there our first and only lesson. What its results were will never be known to the public; a group of intoxicated ghosts lolling on a bench in the depths of a spotted fog can be of little interest to any one except the artists, and even to their indulgent eyes its charm is of a somewhat morbid character. After these agitations, the corner seats of a railway carriage at Victoria had a restful luxury about them that was almost stagnation. The consciousness of two portmanteaus registered to Bordeaux almost made up for the cumbrous row of hand packages that squatted in the netting; and the half-hour of waiting for the train to start was a period of soothing inaction scarcely ruffled by the slow filling of the carriage to its limit of five on each side, and merely moved to a languid enjoyment by the inexorable determination of the latest comers, a bride and bridegroom, to sit next to each other irrespective of all previous arrangements of old ladies and their baskets. They had about them the well-known power of making their innocent and well-meaning fellow-creatures feel in the way and in the wrong, and the eyes of the carriage sought the windows or the ceiling as if by word of command when, after the settling down of glowingly new bags and rugs was completed, the latest comers leaned back and gazed into each other’s faces with an unaffected ecstasy, the fact that both wore gold-rimmed spectacles imparting a sort of serious lustre to their mutual regard. The gaze seemed to us to last most of the way to Dover, except at those moments when a glance or two was given to their fellow-passengers, a glance of almost compassionate wonder that people so uninteresting and so superfluous should be alive. It gave us an instant of pleasure when some time afterwards on board the boat we saw that the bride’s fringe was blown into dejected wisps, and that her groom’s nose was blue and his face pinched.