fell creative energy has
expired and pleasure sunk to be a phlegmatic dislike, almost a loathing.

This would here be done, but for signs of a barometric dead fall in Dame
Gossip's chaps, already heavily pendent. She would be off with us on one
of her whirling cyclones or elemental mad waltzes, if a step were taken
to the lecturing-desk. We are so far in her hands that we have to keep
her quiet. She will not hear of the reasons and the change of reasons
for one thing and the other. Things were so: narrate them, and let
readers do their reflections for themselves, she says, denouncing our
conscientious method as the direct road downward to the dreadful modern
appeal to the senses and assault on them for testimony to the veracity
of everything described; to the extent that, at the mention of a vile
smell, it shall be blown into the reader's nostrils, and corking-pins
attack the comfortable seat of him simultaneously with a development of
surprises. 'Thither your conscientiousness leads.'

It is not perfectly visible. And she would gain information of the
singular nature of the young of the male sex in listening to the wrangle
between Lord Fleetwood and Gower Woodseer on the subject of pocket-money
for the needs of the Countess Carinthia. For it was a long and an angry
one, and it brought out both of them, exposing, of course, the more
complex creature the most. They were near a rupture, so scathing was
Gower's tone of irate professor to shirky scholar--or it might be put,
German professor to English scuffleshoe.

She is for the scene of 'Chillon John's' attempt to restore the
respiration of his bank-book by wager; to wit, that he would walk a
mile, run a mile, ride a mile, and jump ten hurdles, then score five
rifle-shots at a three hundred yards' distant target within a count of
minutes; twenty-five, she says; and vows it to have been one of the most
exciting of scenes ever witnessed on green turf in the land of wagers;
and that he was accomplishing it quite certainly when, at the first of
the hurdles, a treacherous unfolding and waving of a white flag caused
his horse to swerve and the loss of one minute, seven and twenty
seconds, before he cleared the hurdles; after which, he had to fire
his shots hurriedly, and the last counted blank, for being outside the
circle of the stated time.

So he was beaten. But a terrific uproar over the field proclaimed the
popular dissatisfaction. Presently there was a cleavage of the