quire; James Whalley, Esquire; and other distinguished
lecturers, at New Zion.

In the list were papers on "The Duty of Novel Reading," "Henrik Ibsen,"
"A Morris Wall-Paper," "The Nude in Art," and "The Darwinian Theory,"
by Mr. Londonderry himself; "Coalchester, its Past and its Future," by
Mr. Rob Clitheroe; together with "Ireland's Sacred Right to Home Rule,"
by the same lecturer; "Wagner and the New Music," by Mr. James Whalley,
with a paper on "Some Really New Books," by the same; and a paper-on
"Good Taste in Dress," by Miss Jenny Talbot--the virago!

The batteries were to be turned on poor Coalchester with a vengeance.
For some time past there had been uneasy suspicions in the town that
strange and somewhat ungodly forms of new learning and beauty were being
stored as in an arsenal in that little house at 3 Zion Place. A large
cast of the Venus of Milo, it was known, had come from Covent Garden,
London, _via_ a poor little dealer in artistic materials in the town,
who on one occasion had shown a bewildering picture to one of his
customers with the remark, "What do you make of this, Mr. Littlejohn?"

Mr. Littlejohn could make nothing of it, nor indeed could the artists'
colourman, who had been used to pictures all his life.

No wonder, for it was the first Rossetti that had ever been seen in
Coalchester.

And it was the same at the little paperhanger's shop where Theophilus
had ordered some pieces of Morris wall-paper for his room.

"Law! what a taste, to be sure!" had exclaimed the paperhanger's wife as
they opened the parcel. "How any one dare live with such patterns is
beyond me." The paperhanger's wife verbed better than she knew. Few are
those indeed who dare live with beauty.

When the paper was hung in Theophil's room, so great was the sensation
in the household that even old Mr. Talbot ventured to look in at it,
keeping very close to his wife. It was so the old man had stood
open-mouthed before the first steam-engine, and here again was the Devil
plainly at work.

"Lord a-mercy, Jane," he said to his wife, "what is the world coming
to?"

The world was indeed changing beneath the old man's feet, and the
heavens opening as never before in his time--with, he might be right,
some assistance from beneath; and--it was undoubtedly safer in
the kitchen.

Mrs. Talbot in these matters lived and loved by faith in her boy, as she
called him. But even she had her doubts, which she expressed in a way
that s