London, bringing with them an atmosphere of
publishers' offices, of romance in high and low life, of professional
gossip and criticism. Often a stalwart bicyclist rolls up from the
capital, bringing with him such a breeze from the world of newspapers,
theatres, and crack restaurants that Ye Hutte straightway determines to
order some weekly journal, waxes ardent for flesh-pots other than of
Cookham, and resolves upon having a Lyceum twice a week when the Dean
shall be swept by the blasts and St. John's Wood studios swallow us up
for the winter.

The Dean is little favored of the ordinary fashionable visitor, for whom
artistic accommodations are quite too scantily luxurious. Now and then,
for the sake of the river, a rustic cot is taken for a few weeks by a
party of boating-people. Then the quaint, old-fashioned gardens blossom
with a sudden luxuriance of striped tents and flaming umbrellas, while
bright women in many-hued boating-costumes flit among cabbages and
onions like curious tropical birds and butterflies. As a rule, however,
the Dean is abandoned to its usual rustic population and to artists,
numbers of the latter remaining all winter in the haunts whence the
majority of their kind have flown.

The social and artistic peculiarities of the Dean are, of course, too
many to be specified. In a collection of various nationalities, many of
whose number have drifted like thistledown hither and yon over the fair
earth, how could it well be otherwise? It may be observed, however, that
here, as everywhere else in this right little tight little isle, where
habit is the very antithesis of the airy license of "Abroad," it is
_not_, as it is in the artistic haunts of the Continent, _en regle_ to
vaunt one's self on the paucity of one's shekels or to acknowledge
acquaintance with the Medici's pills in their modern form of the Three
Golden Balls.

Once upon a time, in a Barbizon _auberge_, a certain famous artist and
incorrigible Bohemian brought down the table by describing an incident
of his releasing a friend's valuables from durance.

"The moment I turned in at the Mont de Piete," he said, "_my_ watch took
fright, and stopped ticking on the spot."

That same Bohemian, after years of the Latin Quarter and Mont de Piete,
found himself one summer on the Dean. One evening at the porch of Ye
Hutte he met a lively group of painters and paintresses, just returned
from corn-field and meadow.

During the short halt the Bohemi