has a homelier sound, and her speciality is
the delineation of coster character.

SILHOUETTES.

I fear I must be of a somewhat gruesome turn of mind. My sympathies are
always with the melancholy side of life and nature. I love the chill
October days, when the brown leaves lie thick and sodden underneath your
feet, and a low sound as of stifled sobbing is heard in the damp
woods--the evenings in late autumn time, when the white mist creeps
across the fields, making it seem as though old Earth, feeling the night
air cold to its poor bones, were drawing ghostly bedclothes round its
withered limbs. I like the twilight of the long grey street, sad with
the wailing cry of the distant muffin man. One thinks of him, as,
strangely mitred, he glides by through the gloom, jangling his harsh
bell, as the High Priest of the pale spirit of Indigestion, summoning the
devout to come forth and worship. I find a sweetness in the aching
dreariness of Sabbath afternoons in genteel suburbs--in the evil-laden
desolateness of waste places by the river, when the yellow fog is
stealing inland across the ooze and mud, and the black tide gurgles
softly round worm-eaten piles.

I love the bleak moor, when the thin long line of the winding road lies
white on the darkening heath, while overhead some belated bird, vexed
with itself for being out so late, scurries across the dusky sky,
screaming angrily. I love the lonely, sullen lake, hidden away in
mountain solitudes. I suppose it was my childhood's surroundings that
instilled in me this affection for sombre hues. One of my earliest
recollections is of a dreary marshland by the sea. By day, the water
stood there in wide, shallow pools. But when one looked in the evening
they were pools of blood that lay there.

It was a wild, dismal stretch of coast. One day, I found myself there
all alone--I forget how it came about--and, oh, how small I felt amid the
sky and the sea and the sandhills! I ran, and ran, and ran, but I never
seemed to move; and then I cried, and screamed, louder and louder, and
the circling seagulls screamed back mockingly at me. It was an "unken"
spot, as they say up North.

In the far back days of the building of the world, a long, high ridge of
stones had been reared up by the sea, dividing the swampy grassland from
the sand. Some of these stones--"pebbles," so they called them round
about--were as big as a man, and many as big as a fair-sized house; and