on them many houres after; yet I am
little subject to those popular diseases that are taken by conversation
and bred by the contagion of the ayre: And I have escaped those of my
time of which there hath beene many and severall kinds, both in the
Townes, about me, and in our Armie: We read of Socrates that during the
time of many plagues and relapses of the pestilence, which so often
infested the Citie of Athens, he never forsooke or went out of the
Towne: yet was he the only man that was never infected, or that felt any
sickness.

FROM THE BALLAD A-LA-MODE
[Sidenote: _Austin Dobson_]

"Ah, Phillis! cruel Phillis!
(I heard a shepherd say)
You hold me with your eyes, and yet
You bid me--Go my way!"

"Ah, Colin! foolish Colin!
(The maiden answered so)
If that be all, the ill is small,
I close them--You may go!"

But when her eyes she opened
(Although the sun it shone),
She found the shepherd had not stirred--
"Because the light was gone!"

Ah, Cupid! wanton Cupid!
'Twas ever thus your way:
When maids would bid you ply your wings,
You find excuse to stay!

DREAMTHORP
[Sidenote: _Alexander Smith_]

I do not think that Mr. Buckle could have written his "History of
Civilisation" in Dreamthorp, because in it books, conversation, and the
other appurtenances of intellectual life are not to be procured. I am
acquainted with birds, and the building of nests--with wildflowers, and
the seasons in which they blow,--but with the big world far away, with
what men and women are thinking, and doing, and saying, I am acquainted
only through the _Times_, and the occasional magazine or review, sent by
friends whom I have not looked upon for years, but by whom, it seems, I
am not yet forgotten. The village has but few intellectual wants, and
the intellectual supply is strictly measured by the demand. Still, there
is something. Down in the village, and opposite the curiously carved
fountain, is a schoolroom which can accommodate a couple of hundred
people on a pinch. There are our public meetings held. Musical
entertainments have been given there by a single performer. In that
schoolroom last winter an American biologist terrified the villagers,
and, to their simple understandings, mingled up the next world with
this. Now and again some rare bird of an itinerant lecturer covers dead
walls with posters, yellow and blue, and to that schoolroom we flock to
hear him. His rounded