r sham scenery of
Hyde Park, it looks brilliant and grave indeed on a real sea-coast. To
have once seen it there should be enough to make a colourist. O
memorable little picture! The sun was gaining colour as it neared
setting, and it set not over the sea, but over the land. The sea had
the dark and rather stern, but not cold, blue of that aspect--the dark
and not the opal tints. The sky was also deep. Everything was very
definite, without mystery, and exceedingly simple. The most luminous
thing was the shining white of an edge of foam, which did not cease to
be white because it was a little golden and a little rosy in the
sunshine. It was still the whitest thing imaginable. And the next most
luminous thing was the little child, also invested with the sun and
the colour of life.

In the case of women, it is of the living and unpublished blood that
the violent world has professed to be delicate and ashamed. See the
curious history of the political rights of woman under the Revolution.
On the scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the fortunes of
party. Political life might be denied her, but that seems a trifle
when you consider how generously she was permitted political death.
She was to spin and cook for her citizen in the obscurity of her
living hours; but to the hour of her death was granted a part in the
largest interests, social, national, international. The blood
wherewith she should, according to Robespierre, have blushed to be
seen or heard in the tribune, was exposed in the public sight
unsheltered by her veins.

Against this there was no modesty. Of all privacies, the last and the
innermost--the privacy of death--was never allowed to put obstacles in
the way of public action for a public cause. Women might be, and were,
duly suppressed when, by the mouth of Olympe de Gouges, they claimed a
"right to concur in the choice of representatives for the formation of
the laws"; but in her person, too, they were liberally allowed to bear
political responsibility to the Republic. Olympe de Gouges was
guillotined. Robespierre thus made her public and complete amends.

_Alice Meynell._

A FUNERAL

It was in a Surrey churchyard on a grey, damp afternoon--all very
solitary and quiet, with no alien spectators and only a very few
mourners; and no desolating sense of loss, although a very true and
kindly friend was passing from us. A football match was in progress in
a field adjoining the churchyard, and