ortalised. Outside again my
thoughts were oddly turned to the nature of my expedition by two figures
in the road--an unhappy-looking couple, evidently 'belonging to each
other,' the young woman with babe at breast, trudging together side by
side--

'One was a girl with a babe that throve,
Her ruin and her bliss;
One was a youth with a lawless love,
Who claspt it the more for this.'

The quotation was surely inevitable for any one who knows Mr. Meredith's
tragic little picture of 'The Meeting.'

Thus I was brought to think of Sandra again, and of the night when the
Brookfield ladies had heard her singing like a spirit in the heart of the
moon-dappled pinewood, and impresario Pericles had first prophesied the
future prima donna.

Do you remember his inimitable outburst?--'I am made my mind! I send her
abroad to ze Academie for one, two, tree year. She shall be instructed as
was not before. Zen a noise at La Scala. No--Paris! No--London! She shall
astonish London fairst. Yez! if I take a theatre! Yez! if I buy a
newspaper! Yez! if I pay feefty-sossand pound!'

Of course, as one does, I had gone expecting to distinguish the actual
sandy mound among the firs where she sat with her harp, the young
countryman waiting close by for escort, and the final 'Giles Scroggins,
native British, beer-begotten air' with which she rewarded him for his
patience in suffering so much classical music. Mr. Meredith certainly
gives a description of the spot close enough for identification, with time
and perseverance. But, reader, I had gone out this afternoon in the
interest rather of fresh air than of sentimental topography; and it was
quite enough for me to feel that somewhere in that great belt of pinewood
it had all been true, and that it was through those fir-branches and none
other in the world that that 'sleepy fire of early moonlight' had so
wonderfully hung.

After crossing the railway bridge the road rises sharply for a few yards,
and then a whole stretch of undulating woodland is before one: to the
right bosky green, but on the left a rough dark heath with a shaggy
wilderness of pine for background, heightened here and there with a sudden
surprise of gentle silver birch. How freshly the wind met one at the top
of the road: a southwest wind soft and blithe enough to have blown through
'Diana of the Crossways.'

'You saucy south wind, setting all the budded beech boughs swinging
Above the wood anemo