The walls of the little town were placarded with the announcement of a great bazaar to be held for the benefit of the English Church in Bad-Schleppenheim. The economics of a fashionable bazaar are evidently governed by certain obscure laws, of which the knowledge is yet in infancy; for the ordinary laws of commerce are on these occasions completely suspended. That of supply and demand becomes inverted, since the vendors are seemingly eager to sell all that the buyers least want: the cost of production, of which statistics are not obtainable, the expenditure of money, time, and energy required to furnish the stalls is not taken into account at all. Loss and profit appear to be inextricably mingled; however much unsold merchandise remains on the stall at the end of the bazaar the seller is expected to hand over a substantial sum to the good object for which she is supposed to have been working. And yet there must be some advantage in this method of raising money, or even the female mind would presumably not at once turn to it as the simplest and most obvious way of obtaining funds for a given purpose. These problems, however, did not exist for Lady Chaloner, one of the leaders of English Society in Schleppenheim. She took bazaars for granted, as she did everything else. She was one of the very pillars of the social fabric of her country. She was of noble blood, she was portly, she was decidedly middle-aged. She had been recommended to diet herself and to drink the waters of Schleppenheim, and as she did so in company with half the distinguished people in Europe, she was quite content to follow the course prescribed. In these days when everything is called into question, when social codes alter, and an undesirable fusion of human beings takes place in so many directions, it was positively refreshing to turn to Lady Chaloner, who not only did not know, but could not conceive that it mattered, what other people did in any layer of existence beneath her own. She had not at any time a keen eye to discrimination of character. Her judgment of those fellow-creatures whom she naturally frequented was based in the first instance on their degree of blood relationship with herself, then on their social standing: but she was but vaguely aware of the difference between the men and women, especially the women, who did not belong to that inner circle, and knew as little about them as a looker-on leaning from a window in a foreign town knows about the people who pass beneath him in the street. But there were times when she entirely recognised the usefulness in the scheme of creation of those motley crowds of well-dressed persons, even though they bore names she had never heard before. During her preparation for the bazaar, for instance, which she was getting up in the single-minded conviction that nothing better could be done for the institution she was trying to befriend, she had been more than willing to co-operate with Mrs. Birkett, the wife of the