th), and
printed in "Sesame and Lilies."

After this visit to Ireland he spent a few days at Winnington; and late
in August crossed the Channel, for rest and change at Abbeville. For the
past five years he had found too little time for drawing; it was twenty
years since his last sketching of French Gothic, except for a study (now
at Oxford), of the porch at Amiens, in 1856. He took up the old work
where he had left it, after writing the "Seven Lamps," with fresh
interest and more advanced powers of draughtsmanship as shown in the
pencil study of the Place Amiral Courbet, now in the drawing school at
Oxford.

The following are extracts from the usual budget of home letters;
readers of "Fors" will need no further introduction to their old
acquaintance, the tallow-chandler.

"ABBEVILLE, _Friday, 18th Sept._, 1868

"You seem to have a most uncomfortable time of it, with the
disturbance of the house. However, I can only leave you to manage
these things as you think best--or feel pleasantest to yourself. I
am saddened by another kind of disorder, France is in everything so
fallen back, so desolate and comfortless, compared to what it was
twenty years ago--the people so much rougher, clumsier, more
uncivil--everything they do, vulgar and base. Remnants of the old
nature come out when they begin to know you. I am drawing at a nice
tallow-chandler's door, and to-day, for the first time had to go
inside for rain. He was very courteous and nice, and warned me
against running against the candle-ends--or bottoms, as they were
piled on the shelves, saying--'You must take care, you see, not to
steal any of my candles'--or 'steal _from_ my candles,' meaning not
to rub them off on my coat. He has a beautiful family of cats--papa
and mamma and two superb kittens--half Angora."

"_22nd Sept._

"I am going to my cats and tallow-chandler.... I was very much
struck by the superiority of manner both in him and in his two
daughters who serve at the counter, to persons of the same class in
England. When the girls have weighed out their candles, or written
down the orders that are sent in, they instantly sit down to their
needlework behind the counter, and are always busy, yet always
quiet; and their father, though of course there may be vulgar
idioms in his language which I do not recognize, has entirely the