s were as familiar to me as those of any
character in the novels of Miss Austen--a writer whose social
discrimination delighted and appealed to me before I was ten years old.

The Bishop was renowned for his suave and courtly manners, his charming
voice, and the subtle precision of its modulations; and the following
stories of him are still fresh in my memory.

At one of his luncheon parties he was specially kind to a country
clergyman's wife, who knew none of the company, and he took her out on a
terrace in order to show her the view--a view of the sea shut in by the
crags of a small cove. "Ah, my lord," gasped the lady, "it reminds one
so much of Switzerland." "Precisely," said the Bishop, "except that
there we have the mountains without the sea, and here we have the sea
without the mountains."

He was somewhat less urbane to an ultra-fashionable lady, his neighbor,
who had developed a habit, in his opinion objectionable, of exhibiting
his views to her visitors by way of passing the morning. This lady, with
a bevy of satellites, having appeared one day in his drawing room about
the hour of noon, the Bishop, with the utmost graciousness, took them
into a conservatory, showed them some of his plants and then, opening a
door, invited them to go outside. As soon as they were in the outer
air, he himself retreated, saying, as he closed the door, "We lunch at
one."

On another occasion at a dinner party a shy young lady was present,
whose mother, with maternal partiality, admitted that her daughter sang.
After dinner the Bishop had candles placed on the piano, and begged the
shrinking vocalist to give them an exhibition of her skill. The luckless
victim protested that she could not sing at all, but presently, despite
her objections, she was blushing on the fatal music stool, and was
faltering out a desperate something which was at all events intended to
be a song. "Thank you," said the Bishop, benignly, as soon as the
performance was ended. "The next time you tell us you cannot sing we
shall know how to believe you."

On yet another occasion two intrepid females, armed with guidebooks, and
obviously determined to see whatever they could, had entered the
Bishop's carriage drive, and were considering which way they would take,
when their ears were caught by a sound like that of an opening window.
They discovered, on looking about them, that the drive was commanded by
a summerhouse, and, framed in an open window, was the