she looked to the older, everlasting thing, which is never antiquated, but keeps its youth continually. She could hear the sea dashing over the pier, and see how it rose, marking with a white line of surf the sweep of the bay beyond. That was enough to satisfy Marjory, even though the intermediate foreground was filled up by ruins and graves. Nature is always consolatory; but Art not always, not even the pathetic art of antiquity and decay. In this old house the diminished family settled down, not without some sense of comfort. Mr. Charles had his golf, and Milly all the fresh delights of the Links and the sands, the shops and the streets, all of which were sweet to her unsophisticated intelligence. She thought the shops very fine indeed, and liked nothing so much as to go with her sister to buy a ribbon or a handkerchief; and the Links, with the flutter of gay colours about, the red-coats scattered here and there among the groups of golfers, the dresses of the ladies in their sacred corner, or fluttering about the outskirts of the ground devoted to the graver game, dazzled little Milly as with the pageant of an endless theatre, the thing most glorious to her eyes of anything on earth. Far be it from me to attempt to describe the ancient and royal game of golf. How shall a feeble feminine hand attempt to depict its delights and triumphs? St. Andrews is the metropolis of this--let us not call it game, but science. Here its professionals congregate, and its amateurs are happy. Twice round the Links in a day is the whole duty of man; and one round maintains him in that decent condition of moral respectability, falling short of excellence, but above mediocrity, which is in some respects a more comfortable state than that of supreme excellence itself. Mr. Charles fell into this pleasant duty the very first day of his arrival. He was one of the oldest members of that club which has seated itself at the entrance of the Links, like a watchful mother, with bow-windows from which it contemplates benignantly all the out-going and in-coming groups, and tables at which matches are made up, and stories told of the prowess of Tom Morris and Bob Kirk, and how the General halved a game with the Captain, and how Mr. Innesmackie gave Dr. Boothby an odd a hole, and beat him. In these pieces of news everybody is as much, nay more, deeply interested than in all the affairs of the State. Mr. Charles went down to the club on the evening of his arrival. He was a little doubtful for the first half-hour whether, in his melancholy circumstances, after “three deaths in the family,” it would be decorous for him to play; but these scruples were soon overruled.