iles writhed and wriggled upon the spick-span cloth.

"_Mon Dieu! mon Dieu_!" moaned Madame. "And only yesterday every
handkerchief upon the line came in bearing the noses of _messieurs et
mesdames_!"

Aloofly though the Deanite lives, he is not altogether an unsocial
being. Neither are his domestic habits always as invisible to the finite
eye as he perhaps intends them to be. Tent-life has scant privacy, and
the circumscribed accommodation of the Dean leads to frequent "slopping
over" into cloth annexes.

Opposite our windows a certain painter spent no inconsiderable time in
the peak-roofed tent upon the grass-plot. There the young
foreign-looking wife, in scarlet _birette_ and jaunty petticoats just
touching high boot-tops, with long, flowing hair, as bright and
effective as any pictured _vivandiere_, made tea and coffee over a
petroleum-stove, laid the table, sat at her sewing, posed for her
husband, received her callers, as charming a gypsy picture as ever
brightened canvas.

For the very best of reasons, we were not 'cyclists, although in a
country set with 'cycles as the fields with flowers or the sky with
stars.

For reasons equally good, we were not boatists, although the watery way
from Oxford to the sea flowed so near our door, and our village was one
of the gayest head-quarters not only of the fresh-water navy, whose arms
are flashing oars and whose oaths are of the universities, but equally
that of regiments of painters, whose arms are sketching-umbrellas and
easels and who swear not at all,--or at least not to feminine hearing.

Our lodgings were among the artists in the region farther back from the
river than that monopolized by the boating-people. We were back among
the sunny slopes and smiling meadows, the red-tiled farm-houses and
dusky lanes, of the still primitive natives of the region, while the
navy covered the shining river by day and overran the river-side
hostelries by night.

Our lodgings were not picturesque, if truth must be told, although
surrounded by picturesqueness as by a garment,--a circular cloak of it,
so to say. We had the chief rooms of a staring new and square brick
cottage, glaring with white walls inside, shutterless outside, majestic
with a bow-window too high to look from except upon one's legs, owned by
my Lady H----'s gardener, and elegantly named "Ethel Cottage," as a
stucco plaque in its frieze bore witness. We should have preferred
accommodations in any of the ivy-