, with their bilingual acolytes,
Beating, outside its gates, a little ball;

While on the crumbling battlements on high,
Where mail-clad men-at-arms kept watch and ward,
Adventurous sheep amaze the curious eye
Instead of grazing on the level sward.

But though such incongruities may jar
The sense of fitness in a mind fastidious,
Modernity has wholly failed to mar
The face of Nature here, or make it hideous.

Inland the amphitheatre of hills
Sweeps round with Snowdon as their central crest,
And murmurs of innumerable rills
Blend with the heaving of the ocean's breast.

Already Autumn's fiery finger laid
On heath and marsh and woodland far and wide
In all their gorgeous pageantry has arrayed
The tranquil beauties of the countryside.

Here every prospect pleases, and the spot,
Unspoilt, unvulgarised by man, remains,
Thanks largely to a System which has not
Accelerated or improved its trains.

Yet even here, amid untroubled ways,
Far from the city's fevered, tainted breath,
Yon distant plume of yellow smoke betrays
The ceaseless labours of the mills of death.

* * * * *

"William Arthur Fletcher, ship's apprentice, of South Shields,
was remanded for a week on a charge of being absent from his
ship. His captain alleged that he had found Fletcher asleep on
the bridge."--_Daily Dispatch_.

It must have been his mind that was absent.

* * * * *

"At St. Peter's, Vere Street, where he is going to preach from the
30th of this month to the end of this year, the Rev. R.J. Campbell
will speak from the pulpit of Frederick Denison Maurice, like
himself a convert to the Church of England ... To hear him was an
experience never forgotten."--_Guardian_.

And this although MAURICE rarely preached for more than one month on
end.

* * * * *

[Illustration: MANNERS IN MACEDONIA.

LADIES FIRST.]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks_.)

I can't help thinking that _Gyp_, the central figure in Mr. JOHN
GALSWORTHY'S new story, _Beyond_ (HEINEMANN), was unhappy in her
encounters with the opposite sex. But if memory serves me this is an
experience familiar to Mr. GALSWORTHY'S heroines. Men were always
wanting to kiss _Gyp_, or to marry her, or both,