oor penny world; but soon it was all coloured with romance. If I go
to the theatre to see a good old melodrama, 'tis but Skelt a little
faded. If I visit a bold scene in nature, Skelt would have been
bolder; there had been certainly a castle on that mountain, and the
hollow tree--that set piece--I seem to miss it in the foreground.
Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive, and
infantile art, I seem to have learned the very spirit of my life's
enjoyment; met there the shadows of the characters I was to read about
and love in a late future; got the romance of _Der Freischuetz_ long
ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty Formes; acquired a gallery of
scenes and characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain,
I might enact all novels and romances; and took from these rude cuts
an enduring and transforming pleasure. Reader--and yourself?

A word of moral: it appears that B. Pollock, late J. Redington, No. 73
Hoxton Street, not only publishes twenty-three of these old stage
favourites, but owns the necessary plates and displays a modest
readiness to issue other thirty-three. If you love art, folly, or the
bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock's, or to Clarke's of Garrick
Street. In Pollock's list of publicanda I perceive a pair of my
ancient aspirations: _Wreck Ashore_ and _Sixteen-String Jack_; and I
cherish the belief that when these shall see once more the light of
day, B. Pollock will remember this apologist. But, indeed, I have a
dream at times that is not all a dream. I seem to myself to wander in
a ghostly street--E. W., I think, the postal district--close below the
fool's-cap of St. Paul's, and yet within easy hearing of the echo of
the Abbey bridge. There in a dim shop, low in the roof and smelling
strong of glue and footlights, I find myself in quaking treaty with
great Skelt himself, the aboriginal, all dusty from the tomb. I buy,
with what a choking heart--I buy them all, all but the pantomimes; I
pay my mental money, and go forth; and lo! the packets are dust.

_R. L. Stevenson._

THE JULY GRASS

A July fly went sideways over the long grass. His wings made a burr
about him like a net, beating so fast they wrapped him round with a
cloud. Every now and then, as he flew over the trees of grass, a
taller one than common stopped him, and there he clung, and then the
eye had time to see the scarlet spots--the loveliest colour--on his
wings. The wind swung the burnet