"I had an over-dose of the country when I was young, and I'm not given to babble of green fields and pastures new," said Mr. Smythe, whose quotations were apt to be more appropriate than correct. "People may talk as they like about the dulness of Rachel Street, and Sidney Crescent. I only wish they'd had a taste of the High Street of my native town on a hot summer's evening between eight and nine o'clock. That would cure them. Dull, quotha! haven't we the cabs and the tradesmen's carts, and the great vans from King's Cross Station, and coals always being delivered at one's next-door neighbour's. In my native town there wasn't a tradesman kept any conveyance above a wheelbarrow; and as to cabs, there was only one dilapidated old fly in the place. Oh, I should like the people who turn up their noses at Bloomsbury to try Wareham, when the townspeople have gone to a cricket-match in the Castle-Meads, and when the only thing alive in the High Street is one solitary cat stalking upon the tops of the houses. Dull, indeed! why, on such a summer evening as I'm thinking of, I've heard a man yawn three doors off, and I'm sure a hearty sneeze would have startled the whole town." Mr. Smythe had taken to himself a pretty country-bred young wife, the orphan niece of his old friend Charles Raymond, with whom he lived in perfect harmony, and who never read a line of his novels. This was a point upon which the novelist insisted. "If you read my books you'll make suggestions, and if you make suggestions I shall hate you, and the better your suggestions are the more I shall hate you," said Sigismund. "Nor do I care about your knowing the depths of infamy which the human mind, for an adequate consideration, can fathom. The critics inform me that my fictions are demoralising. As a writer and a ratepayer I believe in my fictions; but as a husband I defer to the critics, and forbid my wife to read my novels."