table men; but the thing which surprised both of them
most was that they had been able to save at all.

It is in the letters themselves however rather than in these desultory
comments of mine that the story of these two years of earnest combat
with the great problem of our day must be studied. Short as the time
was, it was broken by visits to France, to Scotland, to Guernsey, and by
his election as Member of Parliament for the borough of Newark. But
even these visits and his new parliamentary position were meant to be
parts of an effort for the regeneration of our poorer classes. His
careful examination of the thrift of the peasantry of the Channel
Islands, his researches into the actual working of the "Assistance
Publique" in Paris, the one remarkable speech he delivered in Parliament
on the subject of vagrancy, were all contributions to this great end. In
the midst of these labours a sudden attack of his old disease forced him
to leave England on a long sea-voyage, and within a fortnight of his
landing in Australia he died at Melbourne. His portrait hangs in the
school which he built, and rough faces as they gaze at it still soften
even into tears as they think of Edward Denison.

SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE.

I.

CANNES AND ST. HONORAT.

In a colloquial sort of way we talk glibly enough of leaving England,
but England is by no means an easy country to leave. If it bids us
farewell from the cliffs of Dover, it greets us again on the quay of
Calais. It would be a curious morning's amusement to take a map of
Europe, and mark with a dot of red the settlements of our lesser English
colonies. A thousand Englands would crop up along the shores of the
Channel or in quiet nooks of Normandy, around mouldering Breton castles
or along the banks of the Loire, under the shadow of the Maritime Alps
or the Pyrenees, beneath the white walls of Tunis or the Pyramids of the
Nile. During the summer indeed England is everywhere--fishing in the
fiords of Norway, sketching on the Kremlin, shooting brigands in
Albania, yachting among the Cyclades, lion-hunting in the Atlas,
crowding every steamer on the Rhine, annexing Switzerland, lounging
through Italian galleries, idling in the gondolas of Venice. But even
winter is far from driving England home again; what it really does is to
concentrate it in a hundred little Britains along the sunny shores of
the South. Each winter resort brings home to us the power of the British
doctor.