and women whose voices must ring on perennially down the ages, giving joy and satisfaction to generation after generation, until the English language has passed with Nineveh and Babylon into the limbo of things forgotten. Sombre hucksters, clerks, shopkeepers moved up and down the dingy roadway. To Kingston, by now, they were but vapours; the street had changed, and its population was of old friends, bright and clearly recognised. Here strutted Wickham and Denny through the dusk, red-coated and raffish, in attendance on the giggling Lydia; and ‘stuffy Uncle Phillips, breathing port wine,’ came lumbering paunchily towards his doorway. Here, where a modern Emporium had faded away, giving place to the neat-fronted little shop of bygone days, shone the shoe-roses that were to dance at Netherfield, and the bonnet that Lydia bought because it was ‘not so very ugly.’ Farther on, again, the pretentious hotel where Kingston was to spend his night had melted into vacancy. In its place stood the long, rambling inn, whitened, clean and simple, with its pillared portico and its hospitable entrance. And whose lumbering chariot was it that stood there at the door, whose high turban and commanding beak loomed out of its deep, cavernous recesses? Surely, surely there was Lady Catherine angrily demanding the road to Longbourne, and insisting that the morrow’s weather must certainly be fine? And now Mr. Bingley rode along on his black horse, blue coat and all; Charlotte Lucas stepped briskly by on an errand; Darcy came escorting the effusive Caroline to the shop; last of all appeared the centre of the vision--the world, rather, where all those visions had been born and made real--the deceptively meek and mild little maiden with the twinkling eyes; the demure and inconspicuous spinster in whom dwelt the keenest spirit that ever spoke in English, or looked out for English ‘follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies.’ Round-cheeked, prematurely capped, sedate, Miss Austen pattered on her road. It was with a sudden cold shock that her passing called back Kingston into the world of to-day. Gone again was the real Basingstoke in a flash, and all the real people that had dwelt there--gone like the sudden wreckage of a dream. Now there stretched before his eyes only the crude and banal sordor of the prosaic modern town. Jude the Obscure, and Sue, and beastly Arabella had violently usurped the place of Bingley and Darcy and adorable Elizabeth. Everything was changed to ugliness and squalor. Kingston, chilled and saddened, returned to the hotel which once more stood on the site of that old inn where the Misses Bennet had eaten their nuncheon.