tioning._)

ISABEL (_who has crept up to her side without any one's seeing_). Oh,
Sibyl, please ask him about the fire-flies!

L. What, you there, mousie! No; I won't tell either Sibyl or you about
the fire-flies; nor a word more about anything else. You ought to be
little fire-flies yourselves, and find your way in twilight by your own
wits.

ISABEL. But you said they burned, you know?

L. Yes; and you may be fire-flies that way too, some of you, before
long, though I did not mean that. Away with you, children. You have
thought enough for to-day.

NOTE TO SECOND EDITION.

_Sentence_ out of letter from May (who is staying with Isabel just now
at Cassel), dated 15th June, 1877:--

"I am reading the Ethics with a nice Irish girl who is staying here, and
she's just as puzzled as I've always been about the fire-flies, and we
both want to know so much.--Please be a very nice old Lecturer, and tell
us, won't you?"

Well, May, you never were a vain girl; so could scarcely guess that I
meant them for the light, unpursued vanities, which yet blind us,
confused among the stars. One evening, as I came late into Siena, the
fire-flies were flying high on a stormy sirocco wind,--the stars
themselves no brighter, and all their host seeming, at moments, to fade
as the insects faded.

FICTION--FAIR AND FOUL.

On the first mild--or, at least, the first bright--day of March, in this
year, I walked through what was once a country lane, between the
hostelry of the Half-moon at the bottom of Herne Hill, and the secluded
College of Dulwich.

In my young days, Croxsted Lane was a green bye-road traversable for
some distance by carts; but rarely so traversed, and, for the most part,
little else than a narrow strip of untilled field, separated by
blackberry hedges from the better cared-for meadows on each side of it:
growing more weeds, therefore, than they, and perhaps in spring a
primrose or two--white archangel--daisies plenty, and purple thistles in
autumn. A slender rivulet, boasting little of its brightness, for there
are no springs at Dulwich, yet fed purely enough by the rain and morning
dew, here trickled--there loitered--through the long grass beneath the
hedges, and expanded itself, where it might, into moderately clear and
deep pools, in which, under their veils of duck-weed, a fresh-water
shell or two, sundry curious little skipping shrimps, any quantity of
tadpoles in their time, and even sometimes a