ral others, quite agreed, and begged that he would recall
something of the kind. The old surgeon said that, though a meeting of
the Mid-Wessex Field and Antiquarian Club was the last place at which he
should have expected to be called upon in this way, he had no objection;
and the parson said he would come next. The surgeon then reflected, and
decided to relate the history of a lady named Barbara, who lived towards
the end of the last century, apologizing for his tale as being perhaps a
little too professional. The crimson maltster winked to the Spark at
hearing the nature of the apology, and the surgeon began.

DAME THE SECOND--BARBARA OF THE HOUSE OF GREBE
By the Old Surgeon

It was apparently an idea, rather than a passion, that inspired Lord
Uplandtowers' resolve to win her. Nobody ever knew when he formed it, or
whence he got his assurance of success in the face of her manifest
dislike of him. Possibly not until after that first important act of her
life which I shall presently mention. His matured and cynical doggedness
at the age of nineteen, when impulse mostly rules calculation, was
remarkable, and might have owed its existence as much to his succession
to the earldom and its accompanying local honours in childhood, as to the
family character; an elevation which jerked him into maturity, so to
speak, without his having known adolescence. He had only reached his
twelfth year when his father, the fourth Earl, died, after a course of
the Bath waters.

Nevertheless, the family character had a great deal to do with it.
Determination was hereditary in the bearers of that escutcheon; sometimes
for good, sometimes for evil.

The seats of the two families were about ten miles apart, the way between
them lying along the now old, then new, turnpike-road connecting
Havenpool and Warborne with the city of Melchester: a road which, though
only a branch from what was known as the Great Western Highway, is
probably, even at present, as it has been for the last hundred years, one
of the finest examples of a macadamized turnpike-track that can be found
in England.

The mansion of the Earl, as well as that of his neighbour, Barbara's
father, stood back about a mile from the highway, with which each was
connected by an ordinary drive and lodge. It was along this particular
highway that the young Earl drove on a certain evening at Christmastide
some twenty years before the end of the last century, to attend a b