d eyes. It was a charming little
picture.

"There, Tim! I can only give you six more!" cries Annie. "I've got to go
and make the puddings" (she said "puddens," but what matter?). Before
she goes she pulls a handful of grass from the threshold and offers it
to the calves. While they tug it this way and that to get it from her
hand, she endeavours to plant a kiss on the moist black muzzle of the
smallest, but he promptly and ungallantly backs and the grass falls to
the ground. At the same moment the children discover me, and an awed
silence succeeds to their chatter. Not to embarrass them, I move off and
fall a-musing as to whether Catherine could make a pudding to save her
life? It is pretty certain it would cost a man his to have to eat it;
does not even her violin playing, to which she has given indubitable
time and attention, set one's teeth on edge to listen to?

Yet why this bitterness? Let me erase Catherine and her deficiencies
from my mind for ever.

April 10.--Again no letter! Very well! I know what I will do. I am
almost certain I will do it. But first I will go down to the beach and
give it a couple of hours' sober reflection. No one shall say I acted
hastily, ill-advisedly, or in pique.

I cross over to the cliff edge. Here the gorse is aflame with blossom;
the short dry grass is full of tiny insect life. Various larks are
singing; each one seems to sing the same song differently; perhaps each
never sings the same arrangement twice!

I go down the precipitous coastguards' stairs. At every step it grows
hotter. Down on the beach it is very hot, but there is shade to be
found among the boulders at the cliff's base. I sit down and stare along
the vacant shore; at the ships floating on the sea; at the clouds
floating in the sky; there is no sound but the little grey-green waves
as they break and slosh upon the stones.

I think of Catherine and Annie, and I remark that the breakwaters are
formed of hop-poles, twined together and clasped with red-rusted iron
girdles; the wood has been washed by the tides white and clean as bones.
I wonder whether I shall ask Annie to be my wife, and I wonder also
whence came those--literally--millions of wine bottle corks that strew
the beach to my right. From a wreck? from old fishing nets? or merely
from the natural consumption of beer at the building of the breakwater?

Coming back to Down End, I find a travelling threshing machine at work
in the rick-yard. I had heard t