All this happened much quicker than it has taken to tell, and ten minutes after the blow was struck Jack was running across the fields to Lewes like a madman, knowing that his brother’s life hung in the balance. While he was gone John Shelley told the men in the tent his youngest boy had met with a serious accident, and was lying between life and death, and, to their credit, the men unanimously stopped singing and took their departure before Jack returned with the doctor. So ended John Shelley’s first White Ram. (_To be continued._) FOOTNOTES: [1] Taken from the Sussex Archæological Collections (out of print). A VEXED “WOMAN’S QUESTION.” BY ISABELLA FYVIE MAYO. There is no more vexed “woman’s question” than that of “clothes.” It has been said that if we see how a man regards money and deals with it, we see the whole character of the man; and we think it is equally true that if we find out how a woman or girl feels and acts about clothes, we should have an excellent key to her nature and history. There is the woman to whom “clothes” are the object of life. This does not necessarily mean that she is a rich woman, who can spend much money, nor does it mean that she succeeds in being a well-dressed woman. She may be one of those who indulge in what the poet Crabbe called “The piteous patchwork of the needy vain,” and who send “one poor robe through fifty fashions”; or she may be a millionaire, always on the alert to catch up the latest fashionable outrage on good taste and good sense. Only in either case, dress is always foremost in her thoughts. The first question she asks about any public event is, “What did the ladies wear?” Her first anxiety concerning any crisis in her own life is, “What shall I put on?” At church she remembers the bonnets and not the text; and the moment she enters an evening party she appraises all the toilets present, and is unhappy unless hers is the most modish and costly, whether it be with the costliness of Worth’s latest whim from the Continent, or of the last box of frippery received at the village shop. If she feels that any reflection is cast on her waste of time and expenditure of money in the matter of dress, she defends herself in the following manner—that she owes it to society to look nice; that it is everybody’s duty to make the most pleasant appearance; that it is well to employ labour and to put money into circulation, etc., etc. If she has “gone in” for “culture,” perhaps she may quote Browning— “Be thy beauty Thy sole duty,” etc.