orm to receive the benediction. Up to this point everybody had
behaved with wonderful restraint; but the last stroke was too much, and
it was amid a perfect scream of laughter from passengers, officials,
cabmen, and _gamins_, that the train steamed out of the station,
bearing the Benedictine Abbot away, but surely not leaving the lambs of
the flock comfortless."

And so she goes on for as long as you like. She has been everywhere.
She has known quantities of out-of-the-way people. She is ready at
every turn with a fresh story, an apposite bit of experience, and darts
in an instant from the perfect mimicry of a popular vicar we know, who
preaches in lavender kids, and leaving his cure of souls for a month's
holiday, pathetically from the pulpit entreats our Lord to look after
his charge until its proper shepherd returns, to some speculation
concerning personal accountability, an annunciation of the
reasonableness of purgatory, and wondering as to its various forms of
discipline for individual souls, or to dwell on minute phases of the
preservation of identity, distinctive and original character after
death, etc., and manifests altogether such an at-homeness with the
unseen world that, listening to her, I half expect phantom eyes will
look into mine if I glance back over either shoulder, bodiless
somethings start forward from dusky corners, the very sweep of my own
drawing-room curtains gets eerie, a what-not or a tabouret becomes a
tripod, my unsubstantial small guest is a priestess--and I'm glad when
Ronayne's voice breaks in, "All in the dark, the fire at its last coal,
no tea or coffee. Mrs. Stainton, you're a syren!"

Her own little sitting-room in the associate house is as heterogeneous
as herself--the room lined with soft comforts, the air heavy with the
fragrance of a profusion of flowers, the room's mistress nearly lost in
the capaciousness of a most luxurious lounging chair, her table piled
with ascetic literature; and in this chamber I encountered the other
day the very oddest of all the peculiar people to whom my friendship
for "little Malaise" has introduced me--a Miss Beauclerc, a short,
stout, dark, coarse-skinned woman of fifty odd, hair cropped close, and
an obstinate, honest, horse face.

She was exhibiting her own "spirit drawings"--mad scaramouches, things
like designs for eastern embroidery, accurate representations of
various portions of the kingdom of heaven, she assured me, and a
quantity of utt