ously, "this dress; is not that easily altered with shops in
the town?"

"Gad!" muttered Mr. Bovill, "that youngster is a second Solomon; and if
I can't manage Elsie, she'll manage a husband--whenever she gets one."

CHAPTER VIII.

"BY the powers that guard innocence and celibacy," soliloquized Kenelm
Chillingly, "but I have had a narrow escape! and had that amphibious
creature been in girl's clothes instead of boy's, when she intervened
like the deity of the ancient drama, I might have plunged my armorial
Fishes into hot water. Though, indeed, it is hard to suppose that a
young lady head-over-ears in love with Mr. Compton yesterday could have
consigned her affections to me to-day. Still she looked as if she could,
which proves either that one is never to trust a woman's heart or never
to trust a woman's looks. Decimus Roach is right. Man must never relax
his flight from the women, if he strives to achieve an 'Approach to the
Angels.'"

These reflections were made by Kenelm Chillingly as, having turned his
back upon the town in which such temptations and trials had befallen
him, he took his solitary way along a footpath that wound through meads
and cornfields, and shortened by three miles the distance to a cathedral
town at which he proposed to rest for the night.

He had travelled for some hours, and the sun was beginning to slope
towards a range of blue hills in the west, when he came to the margin
of a fresh rivulet, overshadowed by feathery willows and the quivering
leaves of silvery Italian poplars. Tempted by the quiet and cool of
this pleasant spot, he flung himself down on the banks, drew from his
knapsack some crusts of bread with which he had wisely provided himself,
and, dipping them into the pure lymph as it rippled over its pebbly bed,
enjoyed one of those luxurious repasts for which epicures would exchange
their banquet in return for the appetite of youth. Then, reclining along
the bank, and crushing the wild thyme that grows best and sweetest in
wooded coverts, provided they be neighboured by water, no matter whether
in pool or rill, he resigned himself to that intermediate state between
thought and dream-land which we call "revery." At a little distance he
heard the low still sound of the mower's scythe, and the air came to his
brow sweet with the fragrance of new-mown hay.

He was roused by a gentle tap on the shoulder, and turning lazily round,
saw a good-humoured jovial face upon a pair of m