tream, and think great thoughts. The stream was still there, and
singing the same sweet old song. You could hear it long after it was
out of sight, in the gathering darkness, like an old nurse humming
lullabies in the twilight.

The dinner was good, the wine was old, and oh! the rest was sweet!
Nothing fills one with so exquisite a weariness as a day spent in good
resolutions and great thoughts. There is something perilously sensuous
in the relaxation of one's muscles, both of mind and body, after a day
thus well spent.

Lighting up my pipe once more, and drawing to the fire, I suddenly
realised a sense of loneliness. Of course, I was lonely for a
book,--Apuleius or Fielding or Boccaccio!

An hour ago they had seemed dangerous companions for so lofty a mood;
but now, under the gentle influences of dinner, the mood had not indeed
changed--but mellowed. So to say, we would split the difference between
the ideal and the human, and be, say, twenty-five.

It was in this genial attitude of mind that I strode up the quaint
circular staircase to fetch Fielding from my room, and, shade of Tom
Jones! what should be leaving my room, as I advanced to enter it,
but--well, it's no use, resolutions are all very well, but facts are
facts, especially when they're natural, and here was I face to face
with the most natural little natural fact, and withal the most charming
and merry-eyed, that--well, in short, as I came to enter my room I was
confronted by the roundest, ruddiest little chambermaid ever created
for the trial of mortal frailty.

And the worst of it was that her merry eye was in partnership with a
merry tongue. Indeed, for some unexplained reason, she was bubbling
over with congested laughter, the reason for which mere embarrassment
set one inquiring. At last, between little gushes of laughter which
shook her plump shoulders in a way that aroused wistful memories of
Hebe, she archly asked me, with mock solemnity, if I should need a
lady's maid.

"Certainly," I replied with inane promptitude, for I had no notion of
her drift; but then she ran off in a scurry of laughter, and still
puzzled I turned into my room, TO FIND, neatly hung over the end of the
bed, nothing less than the dainty petticoat and silk stockings of
Sylvia Joy.

You can imagine the colour of my cheeks at the discovery. No doubt I
was already the laughing-stock of the whole inn. What folly! What a
young vixen! Oh, what's to be done? Pay my b