pon this Asmodean interest; and we are not weary of lifting other
people's roofs and going about behind the scenes of life with the Caliph
and the serviceable Giaffar. It is a salutary exercise, besides; it is
salutary to get out of ourselves and see people living together in
perfect unconsciousness of our existence, as they will live when we are
gone. If to-morrow the blow falls, and the worst of our ill fears is
realised, the girl will none the less tell stories to the child on her
lap in the cottage at Great Missenden, nor the good Belgians light their
candle, and mix their salad, and go orderly to bed.

The next morning was sunny overhead and damp underfoot, with a thrill in
the air like a reminiscence of frost. I went up into the sloping garden
behind the inn and smoked a pipe pleasantly enough, to the tune of my
landlady's lamentations over sundry cabbages and cauliflowers that had
been spoiled by caterpillars. She had been so much pleased in the
summer-time, she said, to see the garden all hovered over by white
butterflies. And now, look at the end of it! She could nowise reconcile
this with her moral sense. And, indeed, unless these butterflies are
created with a side-look to the composition of improving apologues, it
is not altogether easy, even for people who have read Hegel and Dr.
M'Cosh, to decide intelligibly upon the issue raised. Then I fell into a
long and abstruse calculation with my landlord; having for object to
compare the distance driven by him during eight years' service on the
box of the Wendover coach with the girth of the round world itself. We
tackled the question most conscientiously, made all necessary allowance
for Sundays and leap-years, and were just coming to a triumphant
conclusion of our labours when we were stayed by a small lacuna in my
information. I did not know the circumference of the earth. The landlord
knew it, to be sure--plainly he had made the same calculation twice and
once before,--but he wanted confidence in his own figures, and from the
moment I showed myself so poor a second seemed to lose all interest in
the result.

Wendover (which was my next stage) lies in the same valley with Great
Missenden, but at the foot of it, where the hills trend off on either
hand like a coast-line, and a great hemisphere of plain lies, like a
sea, before one. I went up a chalky road, until I had a good outlook
over the place. The vale, as it opened out into the plain, was shallow,
and a l