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reserve attended these two. All
their belongings were marked
with coronets; they never ap-
peared save at table d'hôte.
Some one whispered that a
letter bearing a very great
name had been seen on the
hall table. All this was nothing
remarkable, perhaps, but when
it transpired that each time
the lady went out without the
boy she invariably locked him
into his room, taking the key
away with her, a considerable
curiosity was aroused and
much food for conversation
was provided. Then the thing
came to a sudden and rather
dramatic end, as far as the
pension was concerned. Euro-
pean politics were being dis-
cussed at table one day; great
names were mentioned and
their owners freely criticised,
when of a sudden up rose the
boy, white-faced, from his place
at the board and stalked out of
the room. The mysterious lady
followed him, and presently
summoned the old ladies of
the house. She seemed much
agitated, and said she wished
to see M. L-, one of the
pensionaires. When he came
she showed considerable ex-
citement. He had spoken, she
said, in terms most distasteful
to her pupil of a certain per-
sonage dear in their country,-
he must apologise. M. L
said he had no idea that there
was any one present of the
nationality referred to. He
understood that madame and
her pupil were Norwegians.
Madame, much agitated, said
they were not; monsieur must
apologise. But monsieur was
obstinate and refused to apolo-

gise, and next day the exalted strangers disappeared from the Villa Paradis. Confess that here was an affair most mysterious! I dare not even speculate upon it, lest I should find myself whisked away to a foreign fortress for meddling in affairs of European moment.

As the babel of tongues at table d'hôte began to hold more meaning for us, we found in it considerable entertainment, and we were amused to discover what a reputation for seriousness our nation had in the pension, and what capacities for being "très choqué" we were supposed to possess. Mlle. T's tongue would falter over the most innocent sentiments lest Madame l'Écossaise might be horrified. Our pensionaires professed a polite admiration for the English. "And in Scotland," said one, "you regard yourselves as superior, is it not?" "Ah! but you have so 'triste' a Sunday," they deplored. When my mother made a reference one day to "Trilby," her neighbour looked perplexed. "Is it some one in de Bible?" she inquired hopefully, and being enlightened, she protested that she was not so ignorant of Scripture characters as we might suppose. "No, no," she said, "I am not like Mlle. T-:" She lowered her voice. "Mlle. THe T," she whispered impressively, "did not know who Methuselah was,-of the great age, you know!" Mlle. T————, who had thus shown her ignorance, was a very modern young Catholic. She criticised the

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priests, and declared that she only went to confession when she was away from home. "Otherwise the priest has too much power," she remarked, for all the world like a Protestant. "I mean one day to read the Bible," she said. "It is, I believe, a book 'très intéressant.""

"But the priests, they are not all good," said some one impressively. "In travelling, I assure you I have seen priests on a Friday go into the refreshment rooms and eat of the ham sandwiches, vraiment!"

A sweet old lady opposite became much agitated at this. "They have," she explained, "a special dispensation for travelling. It is not as you think." In her horror she made us realise what a very terrible libel had just been uttered.

On Good Friday meat was not even offered to any one at table except our Scotch and heretical selves. Even old M. K————, who seemed to have few illusions left about the Church, and M. L- , who professed himself a Freethinker, ate of a vegetable diet on that day. It seemed the last rampart between good and evil, like the keeping of the Sabbath in the Highlands.

When I went abroad in my chair to view the brilliant sunny world of the Midi, Pierre the houseboy was my charioteer. He was an engaging youth, with a broad smile and an adventurous disposition. He was delighted with the idea of taking me about, and by way

perhaps of making acquaintance with the chair, he took it out one day surreptitiously, and getting into it at the top of a precipitous hill he let it run. Naturally boy and chair turned somersaults over each other in the middle of the incline, considerably to the detriment of both. My chariot had to go to a shop for repairs, and Pierre's smile was a trifle selfconscious for a day or two. This was perhaps more owing to his slightly bruised appearance than to any qualms of conscience. These he seldom suffered from. "Pierre ! Pierre!" madame said sadly to him one day, "I wish you wouldn't tell so many lies." Pierre shrugged his shoulders and smiled upon her.

"Que voulez-vous, madame!" he remarked with a sort of resigned cheerfulness, "C'est dans ma famille."

The adventurous disposition was perhaps also in his family, for despite his disaster he had a little way of letting the chair go in the middle of a hill and catching it again, which was a little too much like a game of chance to suit my fancy. Otherwise Pierre was a delightful chair-boy, for he was as strong as a pony, and on the hottest day was eager for the most strenuous efforts. explored with him the roads leading hither and and thither among the grey-green olivetrees, and delighted in fields. that produced roses and oranges instead of potatoes and turnips. Here utility seemed a thing less to be desired than beauty. Pierre wheeled me across the

We

perhaps, if instead of watching

grass one day to where a brown-skinned, dried-up-look- it all from a wheeled chair in

ing old man in a blue blouse was planting rose-bushes, and we asked permission to make tea under his olive-trees. He granted it readily, and talked with pride of his bit of land while we waited for our kettle to boil. It had been over three hundred years in his family, he said, and some of the gnarled, twisted, hoary - looking trees, barren now of fruit, were, he declared, a thousand years old. If this were so, they must have been planted over a hundred years when William the Conqueror came over to our islands. What strangely garbed figures of invading soldier or wandering Crusader, of medieval robber or pilgrim saint, may have rested under their shade in days past; what bloodstained or what holy hands may have plucked their olives long ago!

On occasions we went farther afield than Pierre could take me, and drove to to see the Battle of Flowers and the Carnival, or into the mountains for what we called the Mimosa Picnic. The Battle of Flowers disappointed me a little, I confess.

The flower-decked carriages were pretty enough, and pretty sparkling faces looked out from many of them, but the flowers one flung looked pathetically wilted, and it seemed a shame to toss the little sprays of mimosa or heartsease into the dust of the road. It was pretty, but to a lover of flowers it might hardly seem worth the slaughter of so many innocents.

But,

a garden I had been one of the pretty English girls in the procession of carriages, who were so evidently out for a frolic, I might have had a different opinion.

The Carnival, however, was like a revelation of the spirit of the Midi to us. The kaleidoscope of colour, the grotesque figures of bird and beast, the masked domino - clad figures, the utter abandonment to light-heartedness of young and old, were things we could not have imagined. In the streets they no longer walked-they danced; tripping in their brilliant garbs to some ridiculously catching air, and flinging their coloured confetti and streaming paper ribbons over every passer-by. At night the town was a maze of fairy lamps, and the stars from a cloudless vault of dusky blue looked down on a people halfintoxicated with gaiety, dancing under the trees on the Place. Pierre was wild with excitement for a week beforehand, and danced there with the best. Indeed, he danced himself into a feverish cold and came home with a sore throat, which made his merry countenance just the least bit rueful for some days afterwards.

The Mimosa Picnic will linger long in our memories. We drove to it through a rugged hilly country, not unlike parts of our own Highlands, through pine woods that climbed up the hillsides, and beside mountain streams that tumbled over bare and stony

beds. And from the cool green of the pines we emerged at the hilltop into a perfect blaze of colour. The day was a brilliant one, the sky was a bright deep blue, and below us the Mediterranean shone like 8 sapphire, while all over the hill and dipping down the side of it to the sea the dazzling sun-kissed gold of the mimosatrees waved in the breeze. Distant towns and villages gleamed marble white, and the houses round the bay below us might almost have been built of snow. We halted at the edge of the hill above the water, and watched the gold dip to the blue, and sniffed the fragrance in the air, and almost envied the life of the mimosa growers in the little cottages we had passed. Some of them had been lopping off branches for the flower-market as we drove along, cutting down a cartload in a short time. They lived in plain little houses under the golden trees, and looked as if they had nothing to do except gather wealth from the branches in the short spring season. We made a fire and drank tea, and our cocher piled the carriage high with mimosa branches, and we drove home by a different road this time, down by the water and through the sunny town to our little village among the olivetrees. Old M. K had bought chocolates for us that

night, I remember, and he handed them round among the ladies after dinner. Sometimes he laid little buttonholes on our serviettes, going himself into the salle à manger before dinner to put them in their places.

He

Kind old M. K! suffered terribly from rheumatic gout, and went in great fear of becoming crippled, but he had, as the pensionaires said, "beaucoup d'esprit," and his gallant thoughtfulness contributed not a little to the geniality of the Villa Paradis. My last remembrance of him is a pleasant one. We had all assembled in the hall to say good-bye to our Dutch friend, who went away just before we did. There had been some talk of religion at table d'hôte a few nights before, with the unselfconscious frankness about sacred things so strange to the Anglo-Saxon. M. K referred to it as he said goodbye to bye to her. "Au revoir,

mademoiselle, I often think of what you said that we do not thank the good Lord enough for everything." "Yes," said monsieur the Freethinker earnestly, "that was a good thought." Every one chorussed it. Strange, kind, volatile French folk, with their perennial gaiety and their unexpected seriousness. We said goodbye with regret to them and to the Villa Paradis.

A TIGHT PLACE.

BY SIR HUGH CLIFFORD, K.C.M.G.

THEY were sinking the fifth big cylinder of the Periyakulum railway bridge, when Bruce, the engineer in charge of the job, passed the word shoreward that he stood in need of divers.

The cylinder-a great iron tube, twelve feet in diameter, coated inside with a layer of solid concrete a dozen inches thick, and bolted together in lengths of eight feet each had already sunk down through the mud and ooze of the riverbed to a depth of over five fathoms below the water-level. For days the heavy grab had been busy plunging down through the cylinder into the soft bottom, grasping huge mouthfuls of dirt in its steel jaws, lifting them clear, and dropping them overboard; and all the time the big metal and concrete pipe, held erect by stays and scaffolding, had subsided slowly, inch by inch, into the slime. But now, though nearly a hundred tons of rails had been stacked, spelikinfashion, across the mouth of the cylinder to add artificially to its already tremendous weight, it could not be induced to budge. Hard bottom of a sort had been struck, but at too shallow a depth to satisfy Bruce as to its permanency. He knew from the borings that the cylinder must be sunk through this stratum and another layer of mud before

the bed - rock below would be finally reached.

After a short delay two of the divers, Bunny Fitch and Tom Mair, came off in a dugout.

They belonged to a class by no means numerous in the East-white men who perform hard manual labour for a wage; but they were further distinguished from the majority of their fellow-workers by the fact that the craft they plied is one which, even in temperate latitudes, must be reckoned among the dangerous and unhealthy trades. East or West, the element of danger remains more or less constant; but in a tropical climate the unhealthiness, discomfort, and strain of a diver's work are raised to the power of n.

Fitch and Mair had worked together as mates for the best part of a decade, travelling up and down the world from one engineering job to another; varying the monotony by doing a spell of salvage work here and there on sea-bottoms that were like gigantic artificial aquaria ; or by putting in time at some garish tropical seaport, where they groped their way among the mooring-buoy anchors in the fouled waters of the harbour.

They were not only mates, but pals,-close pals, as men who live and work together in fair weather and rough are

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