ds in her lap.

"Hold on just half a minute, Miss Pasmer! don't move!" exclaimed the
amateur photographer, who is now of all excursions; he jumped to his
feet, and ran for his apparatus. She sat still, to please him; but when
he had developed his picture, in a dark corner of the rocks, roofed with
a waterproof, he accused her of having changed her position. "But it's
going to be splendid," he said, with another look at it.

He took several pictures of the whole party, for which they fell into
various attitudes of consciousness. Then he shouted to a boat-load of
sailors who had beached their craft while they gathered some drift for
their galley fire. They had flung their arm-loads into the boat, and had
bent themselves to shove it into the water.

"Keep still! don't move!" he yelled at them, with the imperiousness of
the amateur photographer, and they obeyed with the helplessness of his
victims. But they looked round.

"Oh, idiots!" groaned the artist.

"I always wonder what that kind of people think of us kind of people,"
said Mrs. Brinkley, with her eye on the photographer's subjects.

"Yes, I wonder what they do?" said Miss Cotton, pleased with the
speculative turn which the talk might take from this. "I suppose they
envy us?" she suggested.

"Well, not all of them; and those that do, not respectfully. They
view, us as the possessors of ill-gotten gains, who would be in a very
different place if we had our deserts."

"Do you really think so?"

"Yes, I think so; but I don't know that I really think so. That's
another matter," said Mrs. Brinkley, with the whimsical resentment which
Miss Cotton's conscientious pursuit seemed always to rouse in her.

"I supposed," continued Miss Cotton, "that it was only among the poor
in the cities, who have begin misled by agitators, that the-well-to-do
classes were regarded with suspicion."

"It seems to have begun a great while ago," said Mrs. Brinkley, "and not
exactly with agitators. It was considered very difficult for us to get
into the kingdom of heaven, you know."

"Yes, I know," assented Miss Cotton.

"And there certainly are some things against us. Even when the chance
was given us to sell all we had and give it to the poor, we couldn't
bring our minds to it, and went away exceeding sorrowful."

"I wonder," said Miss Cotton, "whether those things were ever intended
to be taken literally?"

"Let's hope not," said John Munt, seeing his chance to make a laugh.