ssing our late experiences. "Disgusting! It ought to
have been served in a trough! I looked every instant to see her fall
from her chair and have to be carried out. If one is to gorge oneself
like an anaconda once a day upon fruit and chopped straw in order to
live to a good old age, I think we'll elect to be cut off in our
youthful bloom."

But the talk at table was clever and gay, and thoroughly un-English in
that it was general instead of being broken up into a dozen depressing
_sotto-voce_ dialogues. The "healer," indeed, was too busy eating to
open her mouth much uselessly, and the white cat was too timid for
speech. But her editor made amends. He talked for three; not ill, but
with a flavor of bitterness, and not enough in the third person.

"Oh, women are the stronghold of superstition," he exclaimed apropos of
some passage between himself and the American art-student--"fettered
hard and fast by hoary prejudices," he went on with rather a confusion
of metaphors, "else the world might move."

"But we bind you, upon a man's testimony, but by a single hair,"
answered his opponent: "why not burst so slight a shackle?"

"And you to talk of freedom!" he went on as if unhearing. "Why do you
wear that emblem at your throat?" (A plain gold cross which came into
bold relief against her black velvet bodice.)

"Possibly because I'm a Christian." She answered without change of
voice, but stopping the conversation by addressing some one nearer her.
But the little porcelain widow, with a pretty upward movement, like the
flutter of a bird on her nest, caught at a floating thread, and said in
her tiny flute voice.

"But, Mr. Ridley, if he is interested in symbolism, will remember that
the cross is a very ancient symbol, typifying the active and passive
forces in nature--good and evil, light and darkness. And is it not very
curious how everywhere the sign is impressed on external nature--in the
heavens, in crystals, in flowers, in a bird's flight? In the arts too."

"And the legends, fables, and touching or droll superstitions concerning
it are endless," said the white-headed doctor beside me. "And yet I'm
often struck with the comparative newness of what may be termed
literature of the cross. This dwelling on apparition in so many forms of
the Story of the Cross is quite modern, and I fancy that a Good Friday
service, a following through the Three Hours' Agony with a colloquial
soliloquy, if one may use such an expression,