to stop when going). Then, as they
all wished to travel by moonlight, I suggested that dinner also should
be a picnic. We bought food and drink at Honiton, and the country being
exquisite between there and Sidmouth, we soon found a moss-carpeted,
tree-roofed dining-room, fit for an emperor. Nearby glimmered a sheet of
blue-bells, like a blue underground lake that had broken through and
flooded the meadow. Ellaline said she would like to wash her face in it,
as if in a fairy cosmetic, to make her "beautiful forever." I really
don't believe she knows that would be superfluous trouble! And a fairy
godmother has given her the gift of song. I wish you could hear her
sing, Pat. I have heard her only once; but if I hadn't been a fool
already, I'd have become one then, beyond recall.

So we sat there, on the still, blue brink of twilight, till the moon
rose red as a molten helmet, and cooled to a silver bowl as she sailed
higher, dripping light. But tell me this: Would I think of such similes
if I weren't like a man who has eaten hasheesh and filled his brain with
a fantastic tumult--a magical vision of romance, such as his heart never
knew in its youth, never can know except in visions, now that youth has
passed? There's joy as well as pain in the vision, though, I can tell
you, as there must be in any mirage. And it was in a mirage of moonlight
and mystery that we took up our journey again, after that second picnic,
swooping bird-like, from hill to valley, on our way to the Knoll Park
Hotel.

It's an historic place, by the way, with an interesting past--once it
was a country house belonging to an eccentric gentleman--and at present
it is extremely ornamental among its lawns and Lebanon cedars.

As for Sidmouth the town, you have but to enter it to feel that you are
walking in a quaint old coloured lithograph--one of the
eighteenth-century sort, you know, that the artist invariably dedicated,
with extravagant humility, to a marquis, if he didn't know a duke!

There's no architecture whatever. As far as that is concerned, children
might have built the original village of Sidmouth as they sat playing on
the beach; but the queer cottages, with their low brows of
mouse-coloured thatch, protruding amid absurd battlements, have a
fantastic charm. They are most engaging, with their rustic-framed
bow-windows, like surprised-looking eyes in spectacles; their green
veranda-eyebrows, and their smiling, yellow-stucco faces, with low
f