asanter ending. The charter of James--for the town had passed into
the King's hands as the abbot's successor--gave all that it had ever
contended for, and crowned the gift by the creation of a mayor. Modern
reform has long since swept away the municipal oligarchy which owed its
origin to the Stuart king. But the essence of his work remains; and in
its mayor, with his fourfold glory of maces borne before him, Bury sees
the strange close of the battle waged through so many centuries for
simple self-government.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] To one who knows what frightful cruelty and oppression may lie in
simple legal phrases, the indignant sentence in which Walsingham tells
his death is the truest comment on the scene: "Non tam villanorum
praedictae villae de Bury, suorum adversariorum, sed propriorum servorum et
nativorum arbitrio simul et judicio addictus morti."

HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS.

When the snow has driven everybody home again from the Oberland and the
Rigi and all the Swiss hotel-keepers have resumed their original dignity
as Landammans of their various cantons, it is a little amusing to
reflect how much of the pleasure of one's holiday has been due to one's
own countrymen. It is not that the Englishman abroad is particularly
entertaining, for the Frenchman is infinitely more vivacious; nor that
he is peculiarly stolid, for he yields in that to most of the German
students who journey on the faith of a nightcap and a pipe; or that he
is especially boring, for every American whom one meets whips him easily
in boredom. It is that he is so nakedly and undisguisedly English. We
never see Englishmen in England. They are too busy, too afraid of Mrs.
Grandy, too oppressed with duties and responsibilities and insular
respectabilities and home decencies to be really themselves. They are
forced to dress decently, to restrain their temper, to affect a little
modesty; there is the pulpit to scold them, and the 'Times' to give them
something to talk about, and an infinite number of grooves and lines and
sidings along which they can be driven in a slow and decent fashion, or
into which as a last resort they can be respectably shunted. But grooves
and lines end with the British Channel. The true Englishman has no awe
for 'Galignani'; he has a slight contempt for the Continental chaplain.
He can wear what hat he likes, show what temper he likes, and be
himself. It is he whose boots tramp along the Boulevards, whose snore
thunders l