ng. She is much too
like a callow undergraduate altogether, and her sister follows suit,
though perhaps with more refinement of feature--indeed she looks
delicate, and was soon called in. They are in slight mourning, and
appear in gray serges. They left a strap of books on the sofa, of
somewhat alarming light literature for the seaside. Bacon's ESSAYS
AND ELEMENTS OF LOGIC were the first Emily beheld, and while she
stood regarding them with mingled horror and respect, in ran Avice
to fetch them, as the two sisters are reading up for the Oxford
exam--'ination' she added when she saw her two feeble-minded aunts
looking for the rest of the word. However, she says it is only Pica
who is going up for it this time. She herself was not considered
strong enough. Yet there have those two set themselves down with
their books under the rocks, blind to all the glory of sea and
shore, deaf to the dash and ripple of the waves! I long to go and
shout Wordsworth's warning about 'growing double' to them. I am
glad to say that Uchtred has come and fetched Avice away. I can
hardly believe Martyn and Mary parents to this grown-up family.
They look as youthful as ever, and are as active and vigorous, and
full of their jokes with one another and their children. They are
now gone out to the point of the rocks at the end of our promontory,
fishing for microscopical monsters, and comporting themselves boy
and girl fashion.

Isabel has meantime been chatting very pleasantly with grandmamma,
and trying to extricate us from our bewilderment as to names and
nicknames. My poor mother, after strenuously preventing
abbreviations in her own family, has to endure them in her
descendants, and as every one names a daughter after her, there is
some excuse! This Oxford Margaret goes by the name of Pie or Pica,
apparently because it is the remotest portion of Magpie, and her
London cousin is universally known as Metelill--the Danish form, I
believe; but in the Bourne Parva family the young Margaret Druce is
nothing worse than Meg, and her elder sister remains Jane. "Nobody
would dare to call her anything else," says Isa. Avice cannot but
be sometimes translated into the Bird; while my poor name, in my
second London niece, has become the masculine Charley. "I shall
know why when I see her," says Isa laughing. This good-natured
damsel is coming out walking with us old folks, and will walk on
with me, when grandmamma turns back with Emily. H