sponsibility of looking after a whole population of poor,
half-ignorant, unphilosophical creatures.

"Look, now," he would say, speaking of his own tongue, "look at this
teffle of a language! It has no present tense to its verbs: the people
they are always looking forward to a melancholy future or looking back
to a melancholy past. In the name of Kott, hef we not got ourselves to
live? This day we live in is better than any day that wass before or iss
to come, bekass it is here and we are alive. And I will hef no more of
these songs about crying, and crying, and crying!"

Now Sheila and Lavender, in their mutual musical confidences, had at an
early period discovered that each of them knew something of the older
English duets, and forthwith they tried a few of them, to Mackenzie's
extreme delight. Here, at last, was a sort of music he could
understand--none of your moanings of widows and cries of luckless girls
to the sea, but good common-sense songs, in which the lads kissed the
lasses with a will, and had a good drink afterward, and a dance on the
green on their homeward way. There was fun in those happy Mayfields, and
good health and briskness in the ale-house choruses, and throughout them
all a prevailing cheerfulness and contentment with the conditions of
life certain to recommend itself to the contemplative mind. Mackenzie
never tired of hearing those simple ditties. He grew confidential with
the young man, and told him that those fine, common-sense songs recalled
pleasant scenes to him. He himself knew something of English village
life. When he had been up to see the Great Exhibition he had gone to
visit a friend living in Brighton, and he had surveyed the country with
an observant eye. He had remarked several village-greens, with the
May-poles standing here and there in front of the cottages, emblazoned
with beautiful banners. He had, it is true, fancied that the May-pole
should be in the centre of the green; but the manner in which the waves
of population swept here and there, swallowing up open spaces and so
forth, would account to a philosophical person for the fact that the
May-poles were now close to the village-shops.

"Drink to me only with thine eyes," hummed the King of Borva to himself
as he sent the two little horses along the coast-road on this warm
summer day. He had heard the song for the first time on the previous
evening. He had no voice to speak of; he had missed the air, and these
were all the