Again, Ronald, the youth from the Army Crammer’s, finds his way into the music-hall, where he encounters Nita: Immediately he entered the theatre, the sudden sight of the scene stopped him, revealed, as it were, through a great gap. The stage blazed white; masses of recumbent girls, bathed in soft tints, swayed to dreamy cadence of muffled violins before the quivering gold-flecked minarets of an Eastern palace. He leaned against the side of the lounge to gaze down across the black belt of heads. The sight bewildered him. By-and-bye, he became conscious of a hum of voices, and a continual movement behind him. Men, for the most part in evening dress, were passing in procession to and fro, some women amongst them, smiling as they twittered mirthlessly; now and then he caught glimpses of others seated before little round tables, vacant, impassive, like waxwork figures, he thought.... He was throbbing with trepidating curiosity, buffeted by irresolution. With the same exactitude the lonely fells around Scarsdale, where Burkett is parson of the small Cumberland village, arise before us. His posthumous volume, _Last Studies_, contains only three rather long short stories, an ‘in memoriam’ poem by Stopford A. Brooke, and an appreciation very gracefully done by Henry James. Referring in the field of fiction to the crudity of the old hands and the antiquity of new, his appreciator finds it difficult to render the aspect which constitutes Crackanthorpe’s ‘troubled individual note.’ He comes to the conclusion, ‘What appealed to him was the situation that asked for a certain fineness of art, and that could best be presented in a kind of foreshortened picture.’ The short story is mainly of two sorts: ‘The chain of items, figures in a kind of sum--one of the simple rules--of movement, added up as on a school-boy’s slate, and with the correct total and its little flourish, constituting the finish and accounting for the effect; or else it may be an effort preferably pictorial, a portrait of conditions, an attempt to summarise, and compress for purposes of presentation to “render” even, if possible, for purposes of expression.’ From the French Crackanthorpe learnt the latter method, and practised it. When we come to look at these last three stories (which with the tiny collection of _Vignettes_ completes his work) we see how admirably exact is this criticism of his senior.