eproach to her that she wrote no more than one book;
on the contrary, her stopping there seems to me a laudable example. What
one would have wished, after experience, was that she had refrained from
producing even that single volume, and thus from giving her
self-importance a troublesome kind of double incorporation which became
oppressive to her acquaintances, and set up in herself one of those
slight chronic forms of disease to which I have just referred. She lived
in the considerable provincial town of Pumpiter, which had its own
newspaper press, with the usual divisions of political partisanship and
the usual varieties of literary criticism--the florid and allusive, the
_staccato_ and peremptory, the clairvoyant and prophetic, the safe and
pattern-phrased, or what one might call "the many-a-long-day style."

Vorticella being the wife of an important townsman had naturally the
satisfaction of seeing 'The Channel Islands' reviewed by all the organs
of Pumpiter opinion, and their articles or paragraphs held as naturally
the opening pages in the elegantly bound album prepared by her for the
reception of "critical opinions." This ornamental volume lay on a
special table in her drawing-room close to the still more gorgeously
bound work of which it was the significant effect, and every guest was
allowed the privilege of reading what had been said of the authoress and
her work in the 'Pumpiter Gazette and Literary Watchman,' the 'Pumpshire
Post,' the 'Church Clock,' the 'Independent Monitor,' and the lively but
judicious publication known as the 'Medley Pie;' to be followed up, if
he chose, by the instructive perusal of the strikingly confirmatory
judgments, sometimes concurrent in the very phrases, of journals from
the most distant counties; as the 'Latchgate Argus,' the Penllwy
Universe,' the 'Cockaleekie Advertiser,' the 'Goodwin Sands Opinion,'
and the 'Land's End Times.'

I had friends in Pumpiter and occasionally paid a long visit there. When
I called on Vorticella, who had a cousinship with my hosts, she had to
excuse herself because a message claimed her attention for eight or ten
minutes, and handing me the album of critical opinions said, with a
certain emphasis which, considering my youth, was highly complimentary,
that she would really like me to read what I should find there. This
seemed a permissive politeness which I could not feel to be an
oppression, and I ran my eyes over the dozen pages, each with a strip