I wandered about thinking how well Vernon Lee would seize on the “genius loci” of this sleepy city, dreaming in the lilac July twilight, with its alternate vistas of luminous white houses and dark glooms of trees. How she would extract the spirit of the place, and find the exact note in other places with which it corresponded, whether in Gascony, or Tuscany, or Bavaria; and I reflected that all I could do would be to say I had seen Yaroslav--I had walked about in it, and that it was a picturesque city. We left Yaroslav at eleven at night. In the dining-room of the steamer I had left a Tauchnitz volume called _Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther_, by the author of _Elizabeth and her German Garden_. I was looking forward to reading this before going to sleep; but this was not to be. The volume had disappeared. The next morning the matter was explained. There was a family travelling in the steamer, consisting of a mother, a daughter, and a son. The mother was very young-looking, although both the daughter and son were grown up; they had found the book and thought (I suppose) it had been left behind, or that it belonged to the public library. This book occupied them for the rest of the journey. They talked of nothing else. The mother had read it before. The daughter must have sat up late reading it, because she handed it over to the son early in the morning. They all thought it intensely amusing and interesting, but they evidently disagreed about it. These are the things, by the way, which ought to please an author. An author is delighted with a few neatly-turned “clichés” in a literary journal, turned out machine-made from the brains of literary men who have lost all their freshness of palate and can no more enjoy a book than a tea-taster can enjoy a cup of tea; but the reward really worth getting is the passionate interest of the man in the street, of a family, for instance, on a steamer between Yaroslav and Nijni-Novgorod. What they disagreed about was the character of the heroine. The girl loathed her. The mother faintly tolerated her. The son liked her. The girl’s argument was clear and forcible. She said she thought that Fräulein Schmidt was an egotist and fundamentally intolerant, and that she looked down on humanity from a pedestal of superiority. She said she felt the same thing about Elizabeth; Elizabeth and Fräulein Schmidt, she argued, enlisted your understanding, your sense of amusement in a most subtle way, in describing the pain of being interrupted in some delicious occupation by a dreadful bore. The girl said that all these descriptions of bores amused her immensely, but they made her sympathise with the bore. She preferred them to Elizabeth and to Fräulein Schmidt. She felt sure Elizabeth and Fräulein Schmidt had no conception of how trying she probably was to the poor bores. Fräulein Schmidt had infinite tolerance for clever and charming people like Professor Martens and her father, but of the people like the