Helen. Tyrrell looked at her for a moment, and then followed the direction of her eyes. He saw Roger with Mervyn's tea-cup in his hand, his face towards them; he saw him bend down and give it her, and then, sitting down in the chair next her, lean forward and speak to her-the words themselves were lost in the words which were passing between Helen and Humphrey; but Roger's face, as he spoke, was plainly visible. Then Tyrrell turned and looked again at Selma; and, as he saw the expression on her face, his own grew resolute and determined. His mouth set itself for a moment like iron, and there was a most unusual flash in his eyes.

"The sketches are excellent," he said, lightly, turning away from her, and taking one in his hand again. "If you could make up your mind to that ball, now, either of these would be perfect.'

She started at the sound of his voice, and looked round hurriedly as if to see if he had been looking at her. Then, as though she had hardly heard what he said, she answered vaguely, and as if only anxious to make conversation of any kind.

"The ball? Oh yes, the fancy ball. Tell me all about it, Mr. Tyrrell. I've

never seen one."

"Then it would amuse you," he said, carelessly. "It is a pretty sight, and this will be magnificent. Lady Winslow always does things well."

"She is very handsome, isn't she?" said Selma, in a tone of the deepest interest, as she moved her chair a little so that she no longer saw the group by the tea-table.

Well, no," returned Tyrrell, returned Tyrrell, deliberately. "You must be thinking of some one else. Lady Winslow is the ugliest woman in London."

The conversation which followed would have filled Miss Tyrrell with a hope that light was dawning on Selma at last. She kept up the conversation then started on countesses and balls with a feverish eagerness and excitement, putting all kinds of questions on such subjects to Tyrrell whenever the talk seemed in danger of flagging. She was so deeply absorbed that Helen called her twice unheeded, and then came and put her hand on her shoulder.

"I'm so sorry to interrupt you, dear, she said. "I know how anxious you are about the Pauline dresses, but Mervyn is going."

Roger was going, too, it appeared, and Mervyn's eyes, as she said good-bye to

Selma, were even more deprecating than when she kissed her first.

A few minutes after Tyrrell also said good-bye.

"By-the-bye," he said to Selma, as he took leave, "Sybilla tells me that you don't mean to come to us on the second?"

Selma shook her head with a faint smile. The occasion in question was Miss Tyrrell's first large "at home" of the season.

“I shall have Pauline so much on my mind," she said.

"I am sorry!" he answered, gravely, and then he shook hands with Helen and Humphrey, and went away, and, as soon as he was gone, Selma, saying that she had a great deal to do before dinner, ran quickly upstairs.

As the door closed behind her, and Helen and Humphrey were left alone together, the former turned a radiant face towards her husband.

"I wonder whether she noticed," she cried. "I thought she looked rather odd and excited when she kissed Mervyn. Well, at any rate," with a happy little laugh, "I should think she would soon know now. Wasn't it delightful that they should meet here like that? Oh, poor dear, how pleased she will be!"

Humphrey was putting his sketches together with a rather grave and preoccupied air.

"I wonder !" he said, apparently in answer to his wife's first words. "I wonder!"

During the next two or three days that same grave, preoccupied air returned to Humphrey again and again, and Helen thought he must be meditating a new picture. To facilitate his meditations she left him as much as possible alone, expecting each evening that, as she sat with him while he smoked, he would deliver himself, according to his custom, first of a few slow words-few and far betweenwhich should gradually grow under her very womanly and loving, if somewhat incomprehending, sympathy to a full description of the picture which was growing in his mind; a description which he usually seemed to put into words as much for his own sake as for hers. But no such words came from him during these days, though, when Helen left him alone, he would sit meditatively smoking, or walking up up and down with a troubled face.

"I'm afraid I ought not to bang in like this," he said. "But if you're not too busy, old fellow, I should like to talk to you a bit."

A curious look, as of a man who has taken a sudden and rather desperate resolution, and intends to carry it immediately into action, had come over Humphrey's face at the sight of his brother, and it intensified at Roger's words.

"Sit down, old boy," he said. "I've been wanting a talk, too."

Roger paused in the act of settling himself in his chair, and looked at him. "You have?" he said. " 'Well, go ahead then. Or wait a bit," he added. "Suppose I have my say first? It's rather on my mind."

"Go on, then.”

But Roger did not go on. He leant forward in his chair, propped his chin on his hands, and his elbows on his knees, and sat staring into the fire.

Humphrey, old boy," he began, at last, in a low voice, "there's no one knows so well as you do how hard I was hit."

Humphrey started, and looked down at him, his face full of sympathy and hope.

"Yes," he said.

"I shall think of her as long as I live, as—as—well as altogether different to any other woman," Roger went on, slowly; "like a queen, or-or a saint, or something like that. But I'm only a man, you see; and a man wants-wants something nearer to him for his wife I've come to understand." He paused, and Humphrey's face changed suddenly; he turned it away without speaking, and, after a moment, Roger went on :

"I told her just how it was, and she nnderstands exactly. I-she-we-" He paused again, having confused himself past all extrication, and Humphrey said, without looking at him:

"You are not talking of Selma, now. Tell me in so many words what you mean."

"I am engaged to Mervyn Dallas," answered Roger.

He never knew what it was that

CONCERNING SOME GEORGIAN DINNERS.

As introductory to my notes on some remarkable dinners in the reign of George the Third, I shall quote, from "Humphrey Clinker," Matthew Bramble's letters to Dr. Lewis, in which Smollett describes, with evident enjoyment, the wholesome fare at the command of a country gentleman of the period. The squire of Brambleton Hall is made to boast of his "five-year-old mutton, fed on the fragrant herbage of the mountains, that might vie with venison in juice and flavour;" "the delicious veal that fills the dish with gravy;" the barndoor fowls "that never knew confinement but when at roost;"" rabbits panting from the warren; "trout and salmon struggling from the streams;" "salads, roots, and pot-herbs, the produce of his own garden." His orchard supplies his dessert; his dairy yields "nectareous tides of milk and cream, whence he derives abundance of excellent butter, curds, and cheese; " and the refuse fattens his pigs, which are destined for hams and bacon. His beverages are cider, brewed from his own apples; and claret, imported by a friend on whose integrity he can rely. While his bread, sweet and nourishing, is made from his own wheat, ground in his own mill, and baked in his own oven. Let the country gentleman of to-day look upon this picture and weep.

This same Matthew Bramble is of opinion that no nation drinks so "hoggishly" as the English. "What passes for wine among us is not the juice of the grape. It is an adulterous mixture, brewed up of nauseous ingredients by dunces who are bunglers in the art of poison-making; yet we and our forefathers are, and have been, poisoned by this cursed drink, without taste or flavour. The only genuine and wholesome beverage in England is London porter and Dorchester table-beer; but as for your ale and your gin, your cider and your perry, and all the trashy family of made wines, I detest them as infernal compositions, contrived for the destruction of the human species." There is a good deal of truth in this, so far as home-made beverages are concerned, but I would fain

except from the sweeping censure Mrs. Primrose's gooseberry wine.

Smollett introduces into his pages the well-known actor and gastronome, James Quin. At a dinner given by Miss Tabitha Bramble, he characteristically exclaims: "If I was an absolute prince, at this instant, I believe I should send for the head of your cook in a charger. She has committed felony on the person of that John Dory, which is mangled in a cruel manner, and even presented without sauce." Quin used to journey to Exeter in order to enjoy his favourite fish in perfection, the finest being caught on the west coast. One morning after his arrival, his valet came to call him according to custom. "Well, John, any dory in the market?" "No, sir."

"Very well; then I'll lay in bed to-day. Call me this time to-morrow."

When Dr. Robertson, the Scottish divine and historian, visited London, Smollett invited him to join a partie quarrée of ingenuous Scots. He accepted the invitation. The dinner was good, the talk was brilliant. "Having to stay all night," says one of the guests, "that we might spend the evening together, Smollett begged leave to withdraw for an hour, that he might give audience to his myrmidons; we insisted that if his business permitted, it should be in the room where we sat. The doctor agreed, and the authors"-his literary drudges or hacks "were introduced to the number of five, I think; most of them were soon dismissed. He kept two, however, to supper, whispering to us that he believed they would amuse us, which they certainly did, for they were curious characters. We passed a very pleasant and joyful evening. When we broke up, Robertson expressed great surprise at Smollett's polished and agreeable manners, and the great urbanity of his conversation."

The dignified leader of the Scottish kirk, who infused a good deal of his dignity into his historical style, had evidently imagined that Smollett must be "the man he drew" -as coarse and wayward as the disreputable heroes of his novels.

Smollett, in 1752, took Monmouth House, in Lawrence Street, and here every Sunday he gave an authors' dinner, entertaining his less fortunate brethren of the quill with beef, pudding, and potatoes, port, punch, and Culvert's entire butt beer. A very humorous description of the guests occurs in "Humphrey Clinker."

Fielding, that great painter of manners, loved a good dinner when he could get one, which, in his earlier career, was by no means a daily certainty. Like his own Captain Booth, he was frequently induced to sponge upon his friends for it, or for a guinea with which to pay the tavernkeeper. He was over-partial to goodfellowship, which, in that roystering age, implied a good deal of drinking, and, though a fond and faithful husband, tippled at the tavern, and paid the score with the money his poor wife had raised on her ornaments or her children's toys, keeping late hours, and thereby spoiling the modest dinner of boiled mutton she had cooked for him with her own tender hands.

An anecdote is related of him which shows the man better than would a hundred pages of analysis: He was living in Beaufort Buildings; his "parochial taxes" were over due, and had been demanded by the collector with emphatic persistency. At last Fielding went off to Johnson, and, by "process of literary mortgage," procured the needful sum. He was returning with it, when he met an old college chum whom he had not met for several years, and immediately asked him to dine with him at a neighbouring tavern. He found his friend to be involved in great difficulties; and with his usual generous promptitude emptied into his pocket the limited contents of his replenished purse. On his return home he was told that the collector had called twice for his money. "Friendship," said Fielding, "has called for it, and had it; let the collector call again."

In his novels, Fielding seldom dines his characters on anything more sumptuous than a chine of beef or a loin of mutton, with an occasional chicken or two, though he sets them down at the table with greater frequency than almost any other novelist I know of. It would be interesting to count how many dinners and suppers, to say nothing of breakfasts, take place in the course of "Tom Jones"; I believe the reader would be surprised at the total. One of the happiest of his descriptions I take to be that, in "Amelia," of the dinner prepared by Mrs. Booth, to which her husband brings an unexpected guest.

"Amelia," he says, "with the assistance of a little girl, who was their only servant, had dressed her dinner, and she had likewise dressed herself as neat as any lady

who had a regular set of servants could have done, when Booth returned, and brought with him his friend, James, whom he had met with in the Park; and who, as Booth absolutely refused to dine away from his wife, to whom he promised to return, had invited himself to dine with him. Amelia had none of that paltry pride which possesses so many of her sex, which disconcerts their tempers, and gives them the airs and looks of furies if their husband brings in an unexpected guest without giving them timely warning to provide a sacrifice to their own vanity. Amelia received her husband's friend with the utmost complaisance and good - humour; she made, indeed, some apology for the homeliness of her dinner; but it was politely turned as a compliment to Mr. James's friendship, which could carry him where he was so sure of being so ill entertained, and gave not the least hint how magnificently she would have provided had she expected the favour of so much good company-a phrase which is generally meant to contain not only an apology for the lady of the house, but a tacit satire on her guests for their intrusion, and is at least a strong insinuation that they are not welcome."

This is a lesson in true politeness which many hostesses would do well to take to heart.

Our Georgian ancestors were certainly of coarse appetites. You can see, in some of Hogarth's broadly painted satires, indications of the excess to which every class was more or less addicted. Hogarth, himself, preferred a dinner of roast beef and pudding to the daintiest dishes devised by the genius of, let me say, Le Stere, the Duke of Bedford's notable cook. When he and four jolly companions undertook their famous excursion "from London to the Island of Sheppey," extending over five days of adventure, they displayed in their meals a distinct inclination for solidity and substance in preference to the grace and lightness of a refined cuisine. One day they dined upon "hung beef and biscuit," washing down the indigestible viands with Hollands; another day on "soles and flounders, with crab sauce; calf's head stuffed and roasted, with the liver fried, and appurtenance minced; and roast leg of mutton, and green peas." Their beverages were small beer and port! It was with food as heavy, and liquors as strong that Sir Robert Walpole had entertained his Norfolk squires at Houghton.

One of the clauses of the hospitable code of the time was that every guest must be fed to repletion, and liquored into intoxication; and a man's repute for good fellowship depended upon the readiness with which he conformed to this clause.

Beef, and veal, and pork-such being the principal joints that figured at the dinner-table of the English squire, one is the more surprised that on the lady of the house should be imposed the onerous work of carving. Yet as Lady Louisa Stuart reminds us, in her charming memoir of her grandmother, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the mistress of a country house was then expected, not only to persuade and provoke her guests to eat voraciously, but to carve every dish, when chosen, with her own fair hands. The higher her rank, the more indispensable was this laborious duty. Each joint was placed before her in turn, to be operated upon by her, and her alone. The lords and squires on either hand proffered no assistance. The master of the house, seated opposite to her, might not act as her croupier, his special function being to pass the bottle after dinner. As for the crowd of guests who sat below the salt, the most inconsiderable among them, the squire's younger brother, the chaplain who mumbled prayers and took the vacant hand at whist, the curate in rusty cassock from the neighbouring village, or the subaltern from the nearest military station, if suffered through her neglect to help himself to a slice of the mutton that steamed at his end of the board, would have digested it as an affront, and gone home in dudgeon, half inclined to vote the wrong way at the next election. There were then professional carvingmasters, who taught young ladies the art scientifically, and from one of these Lady Mary received instruction thrice a week, so as to be perfect on her father's public days at Thoresby. On those occasions, that she might discharge her duties without let or hindrance, she was compelled to eat her own dinner alone an hour or two beforehand. How she would have welcomed the modern invention of dinners à la Russe !

If Lady Mary had but kept a record of her dinners, how thankful one would have been! She must have dined with all the most distinguished of her contemporaries; she must have tested the skill of the best cooks of her day. Bishops, peers, poets, essayists, beaux, wits, and would-be wits, actors, authors, fine ladies—she dined with

them all! Lord Halifax, Lord Sandwich, Lord Hervey, Lord Carlisle, Pope, of course, and Pope's circle-the Earl of Mansfield, Duchess Sarah of Marlborough, Congreve the dramatist, Henry Fielding, the poet Gay, Dr. Garth, Churchill the satirist these are but a few of the celebrities with whom she dined, or who dined with her. When she lived at Saville House, Twickenham, her table was crowded with notable guests; and she was too experienced a woman of the world not to provide them with something more substantial than "the feast of reason." Abroad, she carried her hospitality with her. Writing to her daughter from Brescia, she says:

"I had a visit in the holidays of thirty horse of ladies and gentlemen, with their servants-by the way, the ladies all ride like the late Duchess of Cleveland-i.e., in masculine fashion. They came with the kind intent of staying with me at least a fortnight, though I had never seen any of them before; but they were all neighbours within ten miles round. I could not avoid entertaining them, and by good luck had a large quantity of game in the house, which, with the help of my poultry, furnished out a plentiful table. I sent for the fiddles, and they were so obliging as to dance all night, and even dine with me the next day."

formed into sentences." His last, and fatal, illness seized him while he was at dinner in the college hall of Pembroke, and he died six days afterwards, July the thirtieth, 1771.

To the author of "Tristram Shandy" and "A Sentimental Journey," that most irreverent of reverends, Laurence Sterne, when he came up from his Yorkshire vicarage to sun himself in the success of his great book, Garrick proved a generous friend. "Mr. Garrick," he writes, " pays me all and more honour than I could look for. I dined with him to-day, and he has promised numbers of great people to carry me to dine wth 'em ... He leaves nothing undone that can do me either service or credit; he has undertaken the management of the booksellers, and will procure me a great price." Sterne's sojourn in London was a glorious cycle of dinners; and he had enough of the gastronome in him to appreciate the seductions of a well-furnished table. Gray writes: "Tristram Shandy' is still a great object of admiration - the man as well as the book; one is invited to dinner, where he dines, a fortnight before." And when some one remarked, in Johnson's hearing, that there was little hospitality in London, Johnson confuted him by a reference to Sterne, who, he said, "has had engagements for three months."

The fastidious and refined Gray would, without doubt, have carried his exquisite taste into the arrangement of his table and the choice of his viands; but hereditary gout imposed upon him the obligation of a rigid abstemiousness. There is a curious passage in one of Horace Walpole's letters, in which he says: "My Lady Ailesbury has been much diverted,

and so will you, too. Gray is in their neighbourhood. My Lady Carlisle says, he is extremely like me in his manner. They went a party to dine on a cold loaf, and passed the day." "A cold loaf" would seem but a sorry dish to set before one's friends! Walpole speaks of him as very ill company at the dinnertable. "From a melancholy turn, from living reclusely, and from a little too much dignity, he never converses easily; all his words are measured, and chosen, and

of men of wit and genius, and has had those of the last century, Addison, Steele, Swift, Pope, Prior, etc., always at his table. The manner in which his notice began of me was as singular as it was polite. He came up to me one day as I was at the Princess of Wales's Court, and said, 'I want to know you, Mr. Sterne ; but it is fit you also should know who it is that wishes this pleasure. You have heard of an old Lord Bathurst, of whom your Popes and Swifts have sung and spoken so much? I have lived my life with geniuses of that cast, but have survived them; and, despairing ever to find their equals, it is some years since I have shut up my books and closed my accounts; but you have kindled a desire in me of opening them once more before I die; which I now do. So go home and dine with me."

One of Sterne's early friends-and perhaps the least respectable-was John Hall