uins, and gathers in picturesque groups beneath castle walls. A flutter
of silks, a ripple of feminine laughter, distract the audience from
graver disquisitions. It is difficult to discuss the exact date of a
moulding when soda-water bottles are popping beneath one's antiquarian
nose.

After all, archaeologists are men, and sandwiches are sandwiches. It is
at that moment perhaps that the Fading Flower is at her best. Her waning
attractions are heightened artistically by the background of old fogies.
Her sentiment blends with the poetry of the ruins around. The young
squire, the young parson, who have been yawning under the prose of
Dryasdust, find refreshment in the gay prattle of archaeological woman.
The sun too is overpowering, and a pretty woman leaning on one's arm in
the leafy recesses of a ruined castle is sometimes more overpowering
than the sun. There is much in the romance of the occasion. There is a
little perhaps in the champagne. At any rate the Fading Flower blooms
often into matronly life under the kindly influences of archaeological
meetings, and antiquarian studies flourish gaily under the patronage of
woman.

There is a certain melancholy in tracing further the career of the
Fading Flower. We long to arrest it at each of these picturesque stages,
as we long to arrest the sunset in its lovelier moments of violet and
gold. But the sunset dies into the gray of eve, and woman sets with the
same fatal persistency. The evanescent tints fade into the gray. Woman
becomes hard, angular, colorless. Her floating sentiment, so graceful in
its mobility, curdles into opinions. Her conversation, so charmingly
impalpable, solidifies into discussion. Her character, like her face,
becomes rigid and osseous. She entrenches herself in the 'ologies. She
works pinafores for New-Zealanders in the May Meetings, and appears in
wondrous bonnets at the Church Congress. She adores Mr. Kingsley because
he is earnest, and groans over the triviality of the literature of the
day. She takes up the grievances of her sex, and badgers the puzzled
overseer who has omitted to place her name on the register. She
pronounces old men fogies, and young men intolerable. She throws out
dark hints of her intention to compose a great work which shall settle
everything. Then she bursts into poetry, and pens poems of so fiery a
passion that her family are in consternation lest she should elope with
the half-pay officer who meets her by moonlight on