ould induce him to proceed.
At length he decreed that if she gave him four strokes and a half in the
small of the back at a spot indicated by himself (the half conceded, he
said, in recognition of the fact that her great grandmother's uncle was
killed at Trafalgar) it was his opinion that her honour would be as good
as new. This was done; they retired to a restaurant; drank two bottles
of wine for which he insisted upon paying; and parted with protestations
of eternal friendship.

Then we had Fanny's account of her visit to the Law Courts. At her first
visit she had come to the conclusion that the Judges were either made
of wood or were impersonated by large animals resembling man who had
been trained to move with extreme dignity, mumble and nod their heads.
To test her theory she had liberated a handkerchief of bluebottles at
the critical moment of a trial, but was unable to judge whether the
creatures gave signs of humanity for the buzzing of the flies induced so
sound a sleep that she only woke in time to see the prisoners led into
the cells below. But from the evidence she brought we voted that it is
unfair to suppose that the Judges are men.

Helen went to the Royal Academy, but when asked to deliver her report
upon the pictures she began to recite from a pale blue volume, "O! for
the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still.
Home is the hunter, home from the hill. He gave his bridle reins a
shake. Love is sweet, love is brief. Spring, the fair spring, is the
year's pleasant King. O! to be in England now that April's there. Men
must work and women must weep. The path of duty is the way to glory--"
We could listen to no more of this gibberish.

"We want no more poetry!" we cried.

"Daughters of England!" she began, but here we pulled her down, a vase
of water getting spilt over her in the scuffle.

"Thank God!" she exclaimed, shaking herself like a dog. "Now I'll roll
on the carpet and see if I can't brush off what remains of the Union
Jack. Then perhaps--" here she rolled energetically. Getting up she
began to explain to us what modern pictures are like when Castalia
stopped her.

"What is the average size of a picture?" she asked. "Perhaps two feet by
two and a half," she said. Castalia made notes while Helen spoke, and
when she had done, and we were trying not to meet each other's eyes,
rose and said, "At your wish I spent last week at Oxbridge, disguised as
a charwoman. I thus had a