ged on a large disused mangle.
Beyond, and opposite to one another, were a dining room so limited in
size that one end of the table abutted on a whitewashed wall, and a
sitting room, luxuriously warm, which was furnished with several deep
and remarkably comfortable chairs. The carpets consisted of rough
coconut matting, and draughts in the bedrooms were excluded by rough
red blankets, which did duty as curtains. The evening repast was almost
obtrusively a tea rather than a dinner, though, in deference to my own
presumably unconverted appetite, I, and I alone, was provided with some
kind of meat. I could not help feeling at times that for my host and
hostess alike this practice of "the simple life" represented a sacrifice
to their principles rather than a complete enjoyment of them, for on
several occasions before bedtime they both confessed to a sensation of
acute hunger, and made an expedition to some mysterious region from
which they returned with substantial parallelograms of bread.

Through the Antony Froudes I also made acquaintance with Lecky, whose
nervous shyness in conversation was in curious contrast to his weighty
style as a writer, and also with Dean Stanley and Whyte Melville the
novelist. Between the two latter there might seem to be little
connection, but I was asked to meet them at a little dinner of four,
Whyte Melville being specially anxious to ask the Dean's advice. This
was not, however, advice of any spiritual kind. Whyte Melville was
thoroughly at home in the social world and the hunting field, and had
made himself a great name as an accurate describer of both, but he was
now ambitious of achieving renown in a new territory. He was planning a
novel, _Sarchedon_, a story of the ancient East, and was anxious to
learn from the Dean what historical authorities would best guide the
Homer of Melton and Market Harborough in reconstructing the world of Bel
and Baylon.

In speaking of novels I am led on to mention an authoress whose fame was
concurrent with Whyte Melville's, and whose visions of modern society
were not altogether unlike his own visions of Babylonia. This authoress
was "Ouida." Ouida lived largely in a world of her own creation, peopled
with foreign princesses, mysterious dukes--masters of untold millions,
and of fabulous English guardsmen whose bedrooms in Knightsbridge
Barracks were inlaid with silver and tortoise shell. And yet such was
her genius that she invested this phantom world wi