Cherry trees grow on the walls running round the Misses Jellicoe's strip of back garden; marigold and Sweet William edge the border in front.

Whenever any of her old pupils came to tea, opening the door herself, she would stand on tiptoe, her chin strained to the farthest extent of her long throat, her eyebrows raised to the roots of her hair, and pipe incredulously: "Why! I do believe she's grown! The elegant creature!"

I had arrived again; this was the road, the same Sweet William. I had to struggle with old memories before I had courage to pull the bell.

The house was built on the time-honored pattern-a long passage, laid with brown oilcloth, one front room, one back, and up a few stairs a tiny sitting-room.

There came a patter of feet; someone peeped through the glass; the door opened; Miss Jellicoe stood on her toes! In another moment she was kissing my cheeks, rubbing her own lean ones affectionately up and down on them. When the door was shut, and the peculiar ancient smell of furniture had crept to me, I felt that I had stepped back a hundred years. The faded green arm-chair still faced the little round table, where "Stepping Heavenwards" lay, and a volume of sacred verse by Frances Ridley Havergal. The inlaid cabinet stood in a corner, with a tall blue and gold French vase full of Honesty; a similar vase on a similar cabinet occupied the opposite corner. Under its glass shade the same gold clock, which never went, but still pointed to half past six. There were the same fringes with tassels. On a slab, covered with glass, two nude females in Parian marble reposed, the one on a tiger, the other on a lion. Fans, yellowed photographs, bullrushes were

pinned on the walls; the green worsted apple, the artificial white rose, still stood on a shelf, where everything was arranged in pairs with a taller vase between them.

"Ah! Here comes Celia! Celia, my dear, this is the little girl who used to weep over her dictation. Shall we adjourn to tea?"

Miss Celia Jellicoe, the elder sister, bustled in, a constant smile fixed imperturbably on her round little face, her eyes screwed up, a tight band of black curls hanging perpendicularly across her forehead. She gave me a delicate peck on each cheek. Miss Flo, in just the attitude I remembered, leaned over the arm of her chair and spoke languidly, drawling her words, arranging her wispy hair with long thin figers.

"Come to the banquet hall!" She got up stiffly, curving her arm like a shy young man. "Shall I manipulate the teapot? Sugar? You don't! Fashionable lady, terrible creature! Celia, she doesn't take sugar!"

The same talk, the same pale-gray pastry fingers. "Your rhubarb jam!" I almost whispered.

"Aunt Issyt's recipe," piped Miss Celia.

"Everything going on as usual?"

"Oh, we've got some very elegant young men in the parish, and a personage from Australia next door. It is Australia; she uses the superfluous feathers to decorate her pictures!"

"And one long one over the lookingglass," prompted Miss Celia. "Such a singular idea!"

When we had finished, Miss Flo spread her thin arms and "shooed" me along the passage, holding out the sides of her rhubarb-colored dress, with its wide band of velvet round the bottom.

"Shall we have a little dumb crambo?

Or are we too 'grown-up'?" Miss Flo drew the corners of her mouth down, assuming severity. I knew it was coming; an old memory smote me when, clutching my hand, she scuttled away making a great noise, as one does to provoke mirth-at a children's party.

Both the Misses Jellicoe loved to act; indeed, their life was one long charade. Dressing up, looking haughty, minding their steps, delicately portraying the "grande dame" was no more acting than their staid intercourse with Martha, the maid, or the airy, impersonal manner with which they discussed economy alone together. Miss Florence particularly delighted in acting the "naughty child" who roars "Ma-ma! I want to go home!" She would also descend to tramping around with a thick stick, growling "Evenin', Garge!" as the British workman, or with a mackintosh and a silent scowl, as a foreigner,

Presently, Miss Celia set out our cold supper in the back room.

and faded that one knew no name to give them. A painting of a slanting cross with a text rolled round it, and a white Madonna lily resting on it, hung over the door; also a seaweed picture, which had been the envy of my life when I was little.

When this meal was finished, Miss Celia put on her stylish toque-made at home, very bright and attractive, the black crown of an old hat with some sky-blue ribbon tied round, and three cream roses. Her plump person was usually buttoned into something tight and beaded; her face always shone like the sun, and she carried herself and her fat black curls with "an air." Miss Flo wore drooping clothes, sleeves with two puffs and long frills of lace, full skirts, and hats which one felt instinctively to have been poke bonnets flattened out to suit the fashion, and which one wouldn't have altered for the world. She trimmed them herself; a wispy rosebud, an astonished pansy. She always lingered in her walking,

I heard her murmur.

"Martha is out. Shall we wash up this evening?"

She always said this in a surprised tone of voice. "Yes, if you care to," Miss Flo would answer, collecting the plates as casually as possible. They washed up every night.

Lying in my huge feather bed, opposite the bell-rope fringe which hung above the window, I seemed to have gone back to some ancient genteel age when, in night-caps and with looped bed-curtains, the Misses Jellicoe were high priestesses to the Goddess of Propriety.

The first meal of the day was eaten early, in the "breakfast-room," a small space at the back of the house, rather crowded with furniture; it had a terracotta patterned wallpaper, and much draping of mantelpiece, shelves, and piano with thin old materials, so worn

hurry," was her favorite expression, drawled ever so slightly, in her genteel, modulated voice. She looked casually at trees and houses which she had passed every day for nineteen years, and went to her teaching down the straight lane, with its low thorn hedges, as though she were a young damsel of olden time, strolling languidly in the shade, for pleasure.

Their lives were so placid that the dropping of a crumb made talk for half an hour; true excitement, such as the annual choir treat, the loosening of the vicar's front tooth, Miss Tweedy's hand-glass cracking though no one had touched it-all this was rare; so that, from the added languor in Miss Flo's gentility, an added breadth in Miss Celia's manner, I quickly became conscious of something new and even more stupendous. Then I learned what had happened-Miss Celia had bought land!

One of a number of strips opening on to a cart track, labelled "Gordon Avenue," its further boundary a muddy little tidal stream, which had become "a stretch of water, with my lawn sloping down to it." The drawing-room windows would face West-every sunset was a pageant!

Nowadays circulars and long officiallooking envelopes would arrive for her. Miss Flo treated them airily; Miss Celia would dimple all over her face, her rosy cheeks shining.

This sort of conversation passed between them:

"Dear me! A letter for you, Celia." "One of those agents, I dare say." Miss Celia took her long envelope delicately.

"Somebody wishing to purchase-oh! this man will sell my house for me. He has clients wanting-let me see'Fourteen bedrooms, stabling, motorshed, timbered land amounting to not less than fifty acres' I'm afraid that will hardly do "Shall you answer it?"

"No, dear, it is wasting a stamp; I did answer three at first, if you remember."

Miss Flo, whose front ends of hair were wound round a curler and lay on her forehead like a large snail, threw the envelope in the fender, and went away to dress. Lingering, I saw Miss Celia rise softly and pick up the cir

The Nation.

"Do you know, we have started building our foundations," she said, and her whole nature seemed to overflow in her beaming smile.

Late that same evening Miss Celia slipped into the back kitchen, and returned with a bulging fish-basket hidden under her cloak. She beckoned to me, a self-important, secretive little smile playing round her lips; then she let us both out, and closed the garden gate very softly.

From far over the sands, the low noise of running water drifted up through the twilight; then I saw the notice-board, "Gordon Avenue." We had come to her own strip of land. There was a dim reflection of sunset in the muddy little creek beyond. She glanced to see that no one else was looking, then, standing quite still in the long grass, wrapped in her cloak, she opened the basket, and poured out its contents of broken bottles, bits of brick and slate, on to another little pile of rubbish at our feet; gazing at it with a tender, speculative, almost reverential smile.

These were the foundations.
Dorothy Easton.

Once you have granted the possibility of the impossible, "The Stolen Singer" becomes an absorbingly interesting tale. The author, Martha Bellinger, has some real power, a good understanding of human nature, and fair command of technique to distinguish her from the rank and file of summer fiction writers. The plot involves the

kidnapping of a famous singer, a shipwreck, a rescue, two love-affairs, a mistaken identity and much more of the same sort,-all well told and all convincing. Bobbs-Merrill Co.

Light but entertaining is the series of girlish letters that make up a little book called "Red Rose Inn." There is

nothing subtle, nothing remarkable about the story or the style except the wholesomeness that pervades the whole account of a rather nice girl's decision between her two suitors. The author is Edith Tunis Sale, and the publishers J. B. Lippincott Co.

"A Big Horse to Ride," by E. B. Deming, author of "Other People's Houses," professes to tell, in the first person, the story of a danseuse, arrived at twenty-eight at the top of her ladder, and looking back on a childhood marked by the dissensions and divorce of her parents; school-days in New York; four years of study in London, a first appearance at a fashionable West End theatre hired for the purpose by her father, a successful engineer and contractor; an immediate engagement for forty weeks with a manager of standing; several tours, always accompanied by an unexceptionable chaperone; marriage to a New York multi-millionaire; domestic unhappiness, separations and reconciliation. The book is elaborate, shrewd, clever, and more decorous than might have been feared, and those interested in the life which it describes will find it very readable. The Macmillan Co.

In "Master Christopher," Mrs. Henry de la Pasture has given us a thoroughly satisfactory novel. She has conspicuously all the virtues of the woman novelist and yet no lack of strength. This latest book is readable and at the same time well worth while. The personages are welldrawn, and while the story never grows high-pitched, the characters hold the reader completely. Because of the separation of their parents, a

brother and sister have lived apart all their lives. The story opens with the coming of the sister to live with her brother on his estate in England. The subsequent story is Trollope-like in its intimacy and delightfully workmanlike in every respect. The adventuress cousin in particular is so real that her mental processes have almost the annoying penetration of Sentimental Tommy's own. E. P. Dutton & Co.

"France in the American Revolution" is a brilliant and scholarly history of the services rendered to American independence by the French government and people, and is appropriately prefaced by M. Jusserand, the present Ambassador, who emphasizes the disinterested-motives that led to the alliance between the two nations. Its author, the late Congressman James Breck Perkins, was for many years an ardent student of French history, and his position as Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs for the National House of Representatives peculiarly fitted him to treat the diplomatic aspects of his subject. His accurate research, impartial judgment and trained historical sense at once impress the reader. The book is rich, too, in popular qualities. Crisp, entertaining character-sketches abound, and by a skilful selection from the journals and letters of the French officers the author has given a vivid impression of colonial customs seen through their friendly yet discriminating eyes. Histories such as this do a positive service in making closer the bonds of international appreciation and good will. Houghton Mifflin Co.