Tawell belongs, if I may so say, to a pre-natal impression. But, as the 'sixties of the last century unroll their record, each page displays its peculiar Horror. In 1860 Constance Kent cut her little brother's throat, and buried him in the back-yard. Many a night have I lain quaking in my bed, haunted by visions of sisters armed with razors, and hurried graves in secret spots. Not much more cheering was the nocturnal vision of Thomas Hopley, schoolmaster, of Eastbourne, convicted in 1860 of flogging a half-witted pupil to death with a skipping-rope, and afterwards covering the lacerated hands with white kid gloves. I confess to a lasting distaste for private schools, founded on this reminiscence. "The Flowery Land" is a title so prettily fanciful, so suffused with the glamour of the East, that one would scarcely expect to connect it with piracy, murder, and a five-fold execution. Yet that is what it meant for youthful horror-mongers in 1864. In 1865 the plan which pleased my childish thought was that pursued by Dr. Pritchard of Glasgow, who, while he was slowly poisoning his wife and his mother-in-law, kept a diary of their sufferings and recorded their deliverance from the burden of the flesh with pious unction. Two years later a young ruffian, whose crime inspired Mr. James Rhoades to write a passionate poem, cut a child into segments, and recorded in his journal--"Saturday, August 24, 1867: Killed a young girl; it was fine and hot." One might linger long in these paths of dalliance, but space forbids; and memory clears nine years at a bound. Most vivid, most fascinating, most human, if such an epithet be permitted in such a context, was the "Balham Mystery" of 1876. Still I can feel the cob bolting with me across Tooting Common; still I lave my stiffness in a hot bath, and tell the butler that it will do for a cold bath to-morrow; still I plunge my carving-knife into the loin of lamb, and fill up the chinks with that spinach and those eggs; still I quench my thirst with that Burgundy, of _which no drop remained in the decanter_; and still I wake up in the middle of the night to find myself dying in torture by antimonial poisoning. But we have supped full on horrors. Good night, and pleasant dreams. XLII SOCIAL CHANGES I have been invited to make some comments on recent changes in society, and I obey the call, though not without misgiving. "Society" in its modern extension is so wide a subject that probably no one can survey more than a limited portion of its area; and, if one generalizes too freely from one's own experience, one is likely to provoke the contradictions of critics who, surveying other portions, have been impressed by different, and perhaps contrary, phenomena. All such contradictions I discount in advance. After all, one can only describe what one has seen, and my equipment for the task entrusted to me consists of nothing more than a habit of observation and a retentive memory.