On all these counts ’Liza was so reluctant and retiring when Oliver tried to ‘tackle’ her, as he called the process, on her reading, that he felt—even in being foiled anew—at least he could triumphantly refute Fan’s unwomanly assertion that the Polley girls would be eager and unmaidenly in receiving and misinterpreting his advances. Oliver never got beyond the discovery that ’Liza’s theory of poetry was decidedly that of rhyme; and she inclined strongly to what was meretriciously sentimental, especially when the sentiment was that of pairs of lovers meeting by sunset or moonlight, under oak trees, or in bowers of roses, or amidst ruins in churchyards. These persons swore eternal fidelity and incontinently died by violent deaths, or one of them proved false, as it were for the purpose of breaking the heart of the other, who continued, to Oliver’s mind, wrongheadedly faithful to a creature who was not worth a moment’s regret. When ’Liza strayed slightly from these stock scenes, it was into the superficial splendour of palaces, or at least into the height of hackneyed picturesqueness as displayed in the castles and fortified towns, the crusades, sieges and battlefields of mediæval times. Followers at a humble distance of Moore, L.E.L., and Mrs. Hemans, constituted her antiquated school of poets. It saddened Oliver to see that ’Liza’s faint poetic fancy could find no resting-place nearer home, and remained on that account utterly divorced from her daily life. It was like a wistful groping for better things far a field. It reminded him of the manlier sort of songs with which Jack Dadd and his comrades diversified their ‘If ever I cease to love’ and ‘Not for Joe.’ How the shop lads, who had not the remotest chance of being active participators in the open-air stir and joy of a hunting field, or who were in no danger of knowing any voyage more exciting than a holiday trip in a river steamer, would give the full force of their young lungs and hearts to the vigorous refrain of ‘John Peel’ or ‘The Bay of Biscay—O.’ CHAPTER XV. THE ANNUAL EXCURSION. Every year the shop people of Friarton showed themselves so united and independent as to have an excursion and picnic of their own, on one of their summer holidays. It was something quite different from the day with their employers, which is such a popular piece of patronage on the part of large firms. The _employés_ had nothing to do with this, they had their own day apart. It was the employers themselves, with their wives and families, who met and agreed to disport themselves together. It was as if—supposing the example could be followed on a large scale—all the linendrapers and all the Italian warehousemen in London arranged to assemble with their households at some spot, as much more distant and more select than Epping Forest and Brighton as the masters’ claims to potentiality and dignity are beyond those of their young men and women.