“I should rather think she does,” said he. “If she once gets a giddy idea into that gaudy feminine head of hers, there’s nothing can shift it. She’s a downright terror. And, I should like to know what cove it was that said women had no sense o’ humour. Why they’re that darned funny they ought to be put in a circus.” “Awful good sort Grace is though, when you get to know her,” said the little parson, most caressingly, “and no end of a patriot as well. She sinks all private and domestic matters when the welfare of her country is concerned. Shouldn’t be a bit surprised if, when this leaks out, they don’t get up a shilling testimonial to her in the _Daily Telegraph_.” “’Nother beer for Toddles,” said the recipient of this flattery, “and Toddles, you can have some gin in it, if you like.” Mercifully enough for her luckless brother Charlie, Miss Grace here remembered that she was hostess, and suspended the conversation to a more convenient season while she ministered to our wants. We all fell again in earnest to our interrupted meal; but I’m sure that the best bowler in England was so depressed throughout his entire being, that he couldn’t possibly have enjoyed his. There was a delicious sense of out-of-doors and the open air as we sat up here under the genial sun of summer. The band was playing now, and the smart mob from the various carriages and the ladies’ tent was parading the bright green lawn prior to the resumption of the game. The crowd was beginning to re-assemble round the ring. And here and there we could observe from our exalted situation, various of the players making a tour of the ground, in their “blancoed” boots and brilliant blazers, pretty generally accompanied too by graceful persons in straw hats and white piqué. Some of these graceful persons happened to be “dressed,” it is true, but their costumes bid the pen pause, as nothing less than a fashion journal could describe them. “I think girls look jolly nice and cool all in white,” said Charlie. “None of your brown holland for me, thank you. Aren’t fond o’ that ruffly, crumply sort o’ stuff, are you Toddles?” “No,” said the cruel Toddles. “And to my unsophisticated mind plain ribands look more chaste than those staring Zingari ties and things they crib from their male relations.”