vaux-de-frise of pen points--must be raised against
every newly minted word and hazardous coiner, or we shall be inundated.
If he can leap the barrier he and his goods must be admitted. So it has
been with our greatest, so it must be with the rest of them, or we shall
have a Transatlantic literature. By no means desirable, I think.
Yet, see: when a piece of Transatlantic slang happens to be tellingly
true--something coined from an absolute experience; from a fight with
the elements--we cannot resist it: it invades us. In the same way poetic
rashness of the right quality enriches the language. I would make it
prove its quality."

Cornelia walked on gravely. His excuse for dilating on the theme,
prompted her to say: "You give me new views": while all her reflections
sounded from the depths: "And yet, the man who talks thus is a hired
organ-player!"

This recurring thought, more than the cogency of the new views, kept her
from combating certain fallacies in them which had struck her.

"Why do you not write yourself, Mr. Barrett?"

"I have not the habit."

"The habit!"

"I have not heard the call."

"Should it not come from within?"

"And how are we to know it?"

"If it calls to you loudly!"

"Then I know it to be vanity."

"But the wish to make a name is not vanity."

"The wish to conceal a name may exist."

Cornelia took one of those little sly glances at his features which
print them on the brain. The melancholy of his words threw a somber hue
about him, and she began to think with mournfulness of those firm thin
lips fronting misfortune: those sunken blue eyes under its shadow.

They walked up to Mr. Pole, who was standing with Wilfrid and Emilia on
the lawn; giving ear to a noise in the distance.

A big drum sounded on the confines of the Brookfield estate. Soon it was
seen entering the precincts at one of the principal gates, followed
by trombone, and horn, and fife. In the rear trooped a regiment of
Sunday-garmented villagers, with a rambling tail of loose-minded boys
and girls. Blue and yellow ribands dangled from broad beaver hats, and
there were rosettes of the true-blue mingled with yellow at buttonholes;
and there was fun on the line of march. Jokes plumped deep into the
ribs, and were answered with intelligent vivacity in the shape of hearty
thwacks, delivered wherever a surface was favourable: a mode of repartee
worthy of general adoption, inasmuch as it can be passed on, and so
with certai