dark blot surmounted by
a patch of vivid red. Once again I turned northwards, and the swift dusk
of evening was falling. The sun had dropped behind the Jersey hills, and
uprising behind Manhattan was a grey mist and a steely sky, ominous of
snow.

As I walked up Pine Street to Van Diemen's Avenue the air was opaque and
silent, while the thick, soft flakes that touched my face like chill
fingers clung to my coat and balled under my feet. Winter, as we know it
not in England, was come at last.

CHAPTER XIII

MISCELLANY

It has struck me often enough of late that, for an artistic and literary
colony, ours is not very acute. For it is a sad and undeniable fact
that, now the Carvilles are gone away to live on Staten Island, they
seem to have ceased to exist as far as Netley is concerned. We alone
seem to have attained to some small knowledge of Mr. Carville's peculiar
record and essentially individual philosophy. We alone know the
relationship with the celebrated and unfortunate Icarus who achieved
international fame by crossing the Atlantic, only to crash to earth, as
so often happens, in a comparatively trivial enterprise. Mr. Carville
and his family never became the talk of the country club. They roused no
interest at the soda-counter of Pakenham's drug-store or in the room
behind the bar of Slovitzsky's Hotel on Chestnut Street. Our literary
club makes no mention in its List of Authors who have lived in Netley,
of Mr. Carville and his _Cameos of the Sea_. Happy the nations who have
no history, they say, and no doubt the aphorism may be applied to
families as well. Certainly, if Mr. Carville proposed, as no doubt he
did, that his family should attain to felicity by a profound obscurity,
he has attained his desire. It is left for Time to show whether
Benvenuto Cellini and Giuseppe Mazzini, when they grow up, will emerge
from that obscurity and astonish the world with some novel
manifestations of the family genius.

But this is to anticipate. The immediate point is that none of our
neighbours--not even our own friends, like Williams nor Eckhardt, nor
Wederslen nor Confield, which last has a sort of vested interest in
Europe which is attested by his much-travelled bag--had any inkling of
the story to which they saw us listening as they passed our porch on
certain afternoons that fall. How little does Mrs. Wederslen think, for
example, that her surmise about the burnt aeroplane was grotesquely
wrong! How little