The Project Gutenberg EBook of Vignettes, by Hubert Crackanthorpe

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.

Title: Vignettes
       A Miniature Journal of Whim and Sentiment

Author: Hubert Crackanthorpe

Release Date: August 29, 2019 [EBook #60193]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIGNETTES ***




Produced by Richard Tonsing, hekula03, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from images made available by the
HathiTrust Digital Library.)

On the roof of the ruined church we lay, basking amid the hot, powdery heather; the cinder-coloured roofs of the town flattened out beneath us—a ragged patch of dead, decayed colour, burnt, as it seemed, out of the rank, luscious green of the Rhône valley. Overhead, a thick, blue sky hung heavy, and away and away, into the steamy haze of midday heat, filtered the Tarascon road, a streak of dazzling white. To the east, the sun was beating on the sandy slopes; to the west, the old Papal palace, like a great, grey, sleeping beast, lifted its long, bare back above the roofs of Avignon.

The lizards scurried from cranny to cranny across the crumbling wall. Below, in the cloister, a cat was curled by a black stack of brushwood. The little place stood empty, and stillness seemed to have fallen over all things.

The warmth lulled one to a delicious 2torpor. I was thinking of the bustling Regent Street pavement, of the rumble of Piccadilly, of newsboys yelling special editions in the Strand, drowsily conjuring up these and other commonplace contrasts.

Then Jeanne-Marie Latou began to speak. She sat between us, with her legs hunched under her coarse, colourless skirt, and some stray wisps of hair looking dingily yellow against the clean white of her coiffe. As she talked, her brown skin puckered oddly about her tiny, shrunken eyes, and her hands—browned also and squat—clasped themselves around her knees. It was not often that Jeanne-Marie Latou spoke French; her vocabulary was quite simple and limited, and every now and then, with an impatient shake of her head, she would break out into patois.

She was telling us of her nephew in Tunis—“Un pays où on ne voit que des sauvages”—and of the sweetheart 3he had left behind at Barbentane; repeating by heart, one after another, his queer, bald, little letters—how he had been kicked by his horse (he was a spahi; “zouave à cheval” she called it), and had been sick ten days in the hospital; and how, without telling anyone, she had scraped together a hundred sous to send out to him. Somehow, irresistibly, while she chattered, I seemed to see that soldier nephew of hers—broad and straight and bronzed, his fez stuck jauntily on the back of his head, noisily noçant avec des camarades with those hundred sous, which old Tante Latou had sent out to him.

By-and-bye, she related her journey to Valence, in the time when she had worked as a cherry-packer for Madame Charbonnier in the Rue Joseph-Vernet, insisting with comical, energetic wrinklings of her forehead on her contempt for the jargon de l’Ardèche.... She had been to 4Marseilles, too, last year—that was a great journey—eighteen of them had gone from Villeneuve, “femmes et filles et trois garçons, dans un train ‘ambulant’—quatre francs et douze sous, aller et retour .... Marseilles, vous savez,” Jeanne-Marie Latou reiterated, “c’est quelque chose ... c’est quelque chose ... c’est quelque chose ... enfin, c’est la plus jolie ville que j’ai trouvée.”

Afterwards, starting to recall bygone times, she described the breaking up of the Chartreuse in quatre-vingt douze, and the selling of the whole building by auction in the little place, there, below us (not for money—no one in the pays had any money in those days—but for assignats), and, Jeanne-Marie Latou explained, “Ceux qui avaient peur n’en prenaient pas, et ceux qui n’avaient pas peur en prenaient.” And her father, who had been a stone-worker, over there at Les Angles, had bid douze cents francs 5d’assignats for the house where the supérieure had lived—douze cents francs d’assignats which no one had ever asked him to pay. There Jeanne-Marie Latou had always lived—seventy-seven years, it was now, as near as she could remember—she, and her husband who had been dead these twenty-three years. She could remember the time when the frescoes on the cloister walls were bright and beautiful, and no grass grew between the flags. Yes, she had seen all the other houses pass from family to family; there were six of them now who had the right to use the old church as a barn, “ma foi, elle est bien grande, l’église,” Jeanne-Marie Latou concluded, smiling knowingly at us, “Mais, quand même, ils se chicanent toujours.”...

And with that, she rose slowly and bid us good-bye, and wished us good health, toddling grotesquely away down the steps.

6After she had gone, we stayed a long while up on the hot roof, watching the dark shadows creep from under the broken bridge across the rippling Rhône, as it swept past towards the sea. And I wondered more drowsily than ever concerning old Jeanne-Marie Latou, and her soldier nephew, with the spahis, away over there in Tunis, and that great journey of hers to Marseilles—eighteen of them from the dead little town below, “femmes et filles et trois garçons, dans un train ‘ambulant’—quatre francs et douze sous, aller et retour.”

The population pours out from mass, flooding every crooked street—rubicund peasants in starched Sunday blouses; olive-skinned, Greek-featured Arlésiennes in quaint, lace head-dresses; strutting petits messieurs 7en chapeau rond and tight-fitting complets; shouting shoals of boys; zouaves, indolent and superb, in flowing red knickerbockers, white spats, and jauntily-poised fez.

A bleating of lambs, plaintive, incessant and dirge-like, fills the Place du Forum; heaped over the gravel they lie, their legs tied under their bellies, and their skinny necks helplessly outstretched: and beyond, the great, green umbrellas of a regiment of wrinkled beldams—fruit-sellers encamped in rows before their baskets.... A strange complication of odours—of cheese, of fish and of flowers—floats in the air: at every alley-corner some auctioneer stands posted—shouting, perspiring vendors of knives, pocket-books, glass-cutters, chromo-lithographs, cement, songs, sabots. An old top-hatted Jew nasally vaunts a wine-testing fluid, and tells horrible and interminable tales of vintages manufactured from decayed dates, 8from vinegar and sugar, or from plaster-of-Paris; a travelling pedicure operates on the box-seat of a gorgeously-painted van, to the accompaniment of a big drum and clashing cymbals; the inevitable strong man defiantly challenges the crowd to split a flag-stone across his bare, hirsute chest; and a blind-folded fortune-telling wench chaunts with mechanical shamelessness the young men’s amorous indiscretions.

Outside the town, the boulevard is gay with the glitter of pedlars’ wares, and flapping, gaudy stuffs, red, green and yellow and blue; travelling showmen are bustling with final preparations, hammering together their skeleton booths, or unfolding gaunt rolls of battered canvas; the steam-orchestra of a Grand Musée fin de siècle bellows from its rows of brass-mouthed trumpets a deafening, wheezy tune; and everywhere, beneath the tunnel of pale green plane-trees, a thick, drifting tide of men and women.

Of a sudden it seems to have come—the poplars fluttering their golden green; the fruit-trees tricked out in fête-day frocks of frail snow-white; the hoary oaks uncurling their baby leaves; and the lanes all littered with golden broom....

The blue flax sways like a sensitive sea; the violets peep from amid the moss; beneath every hedgerow the primroses cluster; and the rivulets tinkle their shrill, glad songs....

Dense levies of orchises empurple the meadows, where the butterflies hasten their wavering flight; the sunlight breathes through the pale-leafed woods; and the air is sweet with the scent of the spring, and loud with the humming of wings....

It lasts but a week—a fleeting mood of dainty gaiety; a quick discarding of the brown shabbiness of winter for a smiling array of white and gold, fresh-green, and turquoise-blue....

10And then, it has flitted, and through the long, parched months relentlessly blazes the summer sun.

A mysterious, impenetrable jungle of green stems, quivering with the play of a myriad baby shadows. A close crowd of flowers—naïve-faced, white-cheeked daisies; buttercups, glistening gold; dandelions like ragged medallions; stubbly bearded thistles; sleek-stalked orchises, white, and mauve, and purple; corpulent, heavy-leafed clover, and skinny ragged robin. And, topping them all, the languidly nodding heads of a thousand seeded grasses, and the dishevelled crests of the red sorrel....

A ceaseless humming of wings—deep-toned and solemn, cheerily bustling, high-pitched and idle....

Hidden in the green-stemmed jungle, 11a world of creatures silently busy—hurrying ants; heavy, gray cockchafers, drowsily lumbering; tiny, red spiders, fidgeting from blade to blade; grasshoppers, with their great sensitive eyes, humanly expressive; shiny, black beasts, wriggling their scuttling bodies; fierce-looking flying things, their vivid red bodies, now poised motionless, now darting capriciously to and fro.

One after another they come for a peep at me. A pair of blue-bottles, chasing one another, dash past; a furry bee chaunts lustily as he bustles from flower to flower; and dark, evil-looking flies hover, hanging their long, sneaking legs....

I went there again to-day; but I did not see her. It is a year now since I met her, sitting alone before her basket, in a corner of the deserted square. Her face was tanned 12deep russet, and wrinkled to a tragic listlessness; she had eyebrows white as clean linen, and full-veined, tremulous hands. When I first spoke to her, I did not know that she was blind. She pulled some handkerchiefs from her basket, and offered them to me in a quavering, far-away voice, explaining that she had hemmed them herself; for she had been brought up as a couturière. I asked her how long she had been blind:—

“It is forty-eight years since I saw anything, monsieur. When I was young I had a great trouble.... For eighteen months I wept, and when I went back to work, my eyes were worn out, and I could see no more.... It is forty-eight years now, monsieur, since I saw anything.... Heureusement, il n’y en a plus pour longtemps ... ce sera bientôt fini....”

She spoke simply, and with quiet dignity; though I could see that she 13was crying a little, as she fingered her handkerchiefs with her full-veined, tremulous hands.

From afar off, high against the sky, we could see the ragged line of its roofs, like an ancient, tattered crest along the back of a precipitous, inaccessible-looking hill.

To reach it we waded the Luys de France, with the water swishing under our horses’ bellies, and climbed a mule-track, tight-paved with cobbles, waywardly winding beneath the contorted limbs of leafy, Spanish chestnuts. The track led us around the outside of the village, close under the shadow of its houses—discoloured-yellow and musty-white, fissured and bestained, battered and starved, till everywhere their bones protruded, bulging, bursting beams.

Low, sloping roofs, moss-grown, 14the colour of old gold, over-lapped the walls, like huge, ill-fitting caps; shading row upon row of wooden balconies, filled with a decrepid multitude of things, which, it seemed, could never have been new—broken earthenware pots; rickety rush-bottomed chairs; strips of old linen; worn-out bass brooms; stacks of dead branches....

Two geese, a yellow dog, and a little black pig had the village street all to themselves. The clock on the tower of the whitewashed church pointed half-past ten, though the twilight had not yet come. And our horses’ hoofs clattered, almost brutally, past the dank-smelling, mud-floored rooms, and the cracked, worm-eaten shutters, wearily moaning with the dull fatigue of stiff-jointed old age.

Toiling up the hill, on the other side, we met a crooked old woman, barefooted, clad in a single frayed 15shirt, carrying a truss of sainfoin on her head.

“Adechats,” she mumbled mechanically, and toiled on barefooted up the stony path, steadying the truss of sainfoin with both hands....

All day an intense impression of lusty sunlight, of quivering golden-green ... a long, white road that dazzles, between its rustling dark-green walls; blue brawling rivers; swelling upland meadows, flower-thronged, luscious with tall, cool grass; the shepherd’s thin-toned pipe; the ragged flocks, blocking the road, cropping at the hedge-rows as they hurry on towards the mountains; the slow, straining teams of jangling mules—wine-carriers coming from Spain; through dank, cobbled village streets, where the pigs pant 16their bellies in the roadway, and the sandal-makers flatten the hemp before their doors; and then, out again into the lusty sunlight, along the straight, powdery road that dazzles ahead interminably towards a mysterious, hazy horizon, where the land melts into the sky....

And, at last, the cool evening scents; soft shadows stealing beneath the still, silent oaks; and, all at once, a sight of the great snow-mountains, vague, phantasmagoric, like a mirage in the sky; and of the hills, all indigo, rippling towards a pale sunset of liquid gold.

Since sunrise I had been travelling—along the straight-stretching roads, white with summer sand, interminably striped by the shadows of the poplars; across the great, 17parched plain, where, all the day’s length, the heat dances over the waste land, and the cattle bells float their far-away tinkling; through the desolate villages, empty but for the beldames, hunched in the doorways, pulling the flax with horny, tremulous fingers; and on towards the desolate silence of the flowerless pine-forests....

And there the night fell. The sun went down unseen; a dim flickering ruddled the host of tree trunks; and the darkness started to drift through the forest. The road grew narrow as a footpath, and the mare slackening her pace, uneasily strained her white neck ahead.

Out of the darkness a figure sprang beside me. A shout rang out—words of an uncouth patois that I did not understand. And the mare, terrified, galloped forward, snorting, and swerving from side to side....

And a strange, superstitious fear 18crept over me—a dreamy dread of the future; a helpless presentiment of evil days to come; a sense, too, of the ruthless nullity of life, of the futile deception of effort, of bitter revolt against the extinction of death, a yearning after faith in a vague survival beyond....

And the words of the old proverb returned to me mockingly:—

A pure stretch of sky; a flat sweep of sea; cobalt-blue, rich and opaque, pervading all things. In the harbour, battered, blue-painted barges, their decks loaded with oranges; bargemen in blue blouses, asleep across the glaring pavement; and along the quay, indefinitely, as far as the eye can reach, row upon row of barrels, repeating from their up-turned ends the same 19stifling note of colour.... The sea licks the jetty wall, lazily, rhythmically: everywhere a sensation of listless oppression, of lifeless torpor....

I have sat there, and seen the winter days finish their short-spanned lives, and all the globes of light, crimson, emerald, and pallid yellow, start, one by one, out of the russet fog that creeps up the river.

But I like the place best on these hot summer nights, when the sky hangs thick with stifled colour, and the stars shine small and shyly, for then the pulse of the city is hushed, and the scales of the water flicker golden and oily under the watching regiment of lamps. The bridge clasps its gaunt arms tight from bank to bank, and the shuffle of a retreating 20figure sounds loud and alone in the quiet....

There, if you wait long enough, you may hear the long wail of the siren, that seems to tell of the anguish of London, till a train hurries to throttle its dying note, roaring and rushing, thundering and blazing through the night, tossing its white crest of smoke, charging across the bridge, into the dark country beyond....

It is known only to the inhabitants of the quarter. To find it, you must penetrate a winding passage, wedged between high walls of dismal brick. Turn to the right by the blue-lettered advertisement of Kop’s Ale, and again to the left through the two posts, and you come to Pleasant-court. And when you are 21there, you can go no farther; for at the far end there is no way out.

There are thirteen houses in Pleasant-court—seven on the one side, and six on the other. They are alike, every one; low-walled as country cottages; built of blackish brick, with a six-foot plot before each, and slate roofs that glimmer wanly on the wet, winter mornings.

But winter is not the season to see Pleasant-court at its best. The drain-sluice is always getting choked, so that pools of mud and brown water loiter near the rickety fence that flanks each six-foot enclosure; and, at Christmas-time, “most everyone is a bit out,” and young Hyams in the Walworth-road stacks half his back shop with furniture from Pleasant-court; and all day long the children of the lodger at No. 5 never stop squalling with chapped faces, and the “Lowser’s” wife makes much commotion at nights, threatening to “settle” 22her husband, and sending her four children to clatter about the pavement.

In the summer, however, everyone smartens up, and by the time that sultry June days have come, Pleasant-court attempts a rural air. On the left-hand side a jaded creeper pushes its grimy greenery under the windows; some of the grass plots grow quite bushy with tough, wizened stalks; and the geranium pots at No. 7 strike flaming specks of vermilion.

Last March the “Lowser” and his wife and his four children moved over to Southwark; the lodger at No. 5 is in work again; and now the quiet of seclusion is restored to Pleasant-court.

The children sprawl the afternoon through on the hot alley floor; Mrs. Hodgkiss hangs her washing to bulge and flap across the court, like a line of white banners; and on the airless 23evenings, the women, limp, with their straggling hair, and loose, bedraggled skirts, lean their bare, fleshy elbows over the fence, lingering to gossip before they go to dinner.

And on Saturday nights, the inhabitants of Pleasant-court troop out to join the rumble and the rattle of the Walworth-road, and to swell the life that shuffles down its pavement, past the flaring naphtha lights, the stall-keepers bawling in the gutter, and every shop ablaze with gross jets of gas.

These are their names—Carlotta, Lubella, Belinda, Aminta, Clarissa. By the old bowling-green they stand, a little pompously perhaps, with a slight superfluity of dignity, conscious of their own full, comely contours—a courtly group of rotund dames. Heavy Carlotta, the 24eldest, lover of blatant luxury, overblown, middle-aged, in her gown of rich magenta, all embroidered with tawdry gilt; Lubella, wearing portly velvet of dark purple, sensual, indolent, insolent as an empress of old, gleaming her thin, yellow eye; insignificant Belinda, bedecked in silly, sentimental mauve, all for dallying with the facile gossip of galanterie, gushing, giggling, gullible; unsophisticated Aminta, with tresses of flaming gold, amiable and obvious as a common stage heroine; and Clarissa, the youngest, slyly smirking the while, above her frock of milk-white innocence.

Whenever the London sun touches the small, dusky shops with a jumble of begrimed colour—the old gold and scarlet of hanging meat; the metallic green of 25mature cabbages; the wavering russet of piled potatoes; the sharp white of fly-bills, pasted all awry—then the moment to see her is come. You will find her, bareheaded and touzled; her dingy, peaked shawl hanging down her back, and in front the bellying expanse of her soiled apron; blocking the pavement; established by her own corner of the Lane, all littered with the cries of children, and the fitful throbbing of the asphalte beneath the hollow hammering of hoofs.

She carries always a baby by her breast; her bare forearms are as bulky as any man’s; in her eyes is a froward scowl; and, when she laughs, it is with a harsh, strident gaiety. But she never fails to wear her squalid portliness with a robust and defiant dignity, that makes her figure definitely symbolic of Cockney maternity.

The leaden sea plashed her indolent rhythm: all along the lonely shore the orchards stood motionless, sombre, metallic-looking in the lifeless, thunder-charged air; and amid a rugged flare of smoky flame, the sun went down in the West.

A baby breeze rustled past, fleeing before the distant storm: then, all grew still again, while, across the horizon, a quiet rift broke, revealing a long, lurid line of fantastic coast—mysterious, desolate valleys, and ragged towering cliffs.

The leaden sea plashed her indolent rhythm; and the bleak bulk of a steamer, pitching in the offing, moved like a beast in distress.

And once again, fresh and cool, carrying the scent of the storm, the breeze came fleeing, trailing an inky stain over the sea; and across the West there defiled a vague squadron of gigantic pillars of rain.

The parched trees swayed their 27boughs, uneasily whispering; and, of a sudden, wrapping all things in a dense shroud of dark-grey mist, clattered the ponderous rain.

And overhead, on, through the growing night, the white, jagged flashes of lightning, and the frenzied flight of the screaming wind, and the dull booming of thunder told of the great, distant battle of the clouds.

A mauve sky, all subtle; a discreet rusticity, daintily modern, femininely delicate; a whole finikin arrangement of trim trees, of rectangular orchards, of tiny, spruce houses, tall-roofed and pink-faced, with white shutters demurely closed. Here and there a prim farmyard; a squat church-spire; and bloused peasants jogging behind rotund white horses, 28along a straight and gleaming road. In all the landscape no trace of the slovenly profusion of the picturesque; but rather a distinguished reticence of detail, fresh, coquettish, almost dapper.

Paris in October—all white and a-glitter under a cold, sparkling sky, and the trees of the boulevards trembling their frail, russet leaves; garish, petulant Paris; complacently content with her sauntering crowds, her monotonous arrangements in pink and white and blue; ever busied with her own publicity, her tiresome, obvious vice, and her parochial modernity coquetting with cosmopolitanism....

Strips of ruddy earth: poplars flecked with gold, and vineyards with autumn red; the dark, sleek Saône; and beyond, the pale green plain, spacious and smooth, stretching away and away towards the blue haze that wraps the Côte d’Or, hesitating and soft as the lines of a woman’s body.

The sun sets, trailing a wash of pale, watery gold; torn, inky clouds spatter the sky; sombre shadows fill the acacia-groves; and on, on, pounds the train, untiring, rhythmically throbbing.

Often must Amiel, who lived his life on the shores of this great lake, have brooded over her moods. Deep-blue, she lies plunged in silent meditation; wrapped in the opal-tinted mists of evening, she 30dreams the vague, glad dreams of fancy; now she smiles, she laughs even, as little ripples, all gilded by the sun-rays, trip across her surface; she has her grey days of gloom, and her dark days of despair: she has also her jours de fête, and her jours de grande toilette, under a sky heavy-loaded with blue: often, in the moonlight, she lies white, tranquil, statuesque, like a beautiful, sleeping woman: at times her humour is bewilderingly capricious; the fleeting, furious rages of a spoilt child sweep across her; or, ink-coloured, she sulks during long hours, sullenly wrathful.

Up every staircase-street—dark crevasses, pinched between tall, peeling cliffs; along the quay, flaunting, tattered, brawling colours, sweating and swarming with noisy life—negroes, Chinamen, Arabs, Lascars, 31Italians, Greeks—the angry hum of a thousand tongues and the clatter of straining mules.... At midday, when all the smooth stone pavement lies bathed in lusty sunshine, you may feel the pulse of old Marseilles quicken to fever-heat its turbulent throbbing....

Across the sea, polished as a pool of molten metal, the Southern sun strews his golden highway; the frail forest of masts stiffens, congealed like a fine etched pattern; side by side lie the herds of steamers, silent, drowsy, vermilion-bellied beasts; and over there, to the left, high above the city, the slim silhouette of Notre-Dame de la Garde shows a glimmer of dusky gilt....

Oh! for the crude crowd of blatant hues and the flood of fierce vitality that belong to old Marseilles at midday!

High, beneath the lofty dome of sullen sky, like a great white globe of electric light, the full moon hangs; beyond the bay, the twinkling lights of Monaco are dropping long golden tears into the sea: no breath of breeze to sway the black drooping palms; only the full, solemn phrase of Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” slowly recurring to linger in the still, grave air of the night....

The moonbeams spangle with silver the twin minarets of the temple of Chance; and stately officials swing back its portals to meet the silent tide of worshippers that ceaselessly ebbs and flows, blackening the broad flight of marble steps.

Within, through the great marble vestibule, where the shuffle of feet rings hollow, they hurry to huddle around the bright green shrines of the goddess, to await, with tense, yellow faces, the unflagging tide of her relentless caprices.

I sat on the terrace of the old palace, waiting for the coming of the rain-clouds. The sunshine was gone, and with it the city’s witty sparkle; the sirocco’s breath puffed warm and moist; and Florence, all ruddled and sullen, lay chaunting her ponderous notes of bronze.

Below, knee-deep in the yellow, straggling stream, a fisherman swayed his net, slowly straining the supple framework; and while I watched him, of a sudden, a fitful longing to see the place again laid hold of me—to see it, just as it had been last year, on that mellow September afternoon, all garnished with soft light, all fragrant with coquettish simplicity and pleasant, prosperous peace. And soon, as the sky darkened, and the rain-clouds—a sombre, swelling herd—gathered above the cypresses of San Miniato, I seemed to hear the organ’s stately roll, and to perceive, through the obscurity of the half-darkened chapel, 34a crowding circle of white-robed figures. The chaunt of the church bells beat the air: all else seemed stilled—love and the quickening joy of life—and with a sort of childish inconsequence, bred perhaps of the curious, literary habit, I fell to envying them a little—those tall, white-robed fathers—their miniature rows of monkish gardens, and their solitary pacings beneath the pale-lemon cloisters....

So I started to go there, rattling through the dust in the face of the coming storm. By the roadside, the grey olives matched the sky; all around, the vines hung delicately dying, drooping in tired curves their fragile garlands of pallid-gold leaves; and here and there peeped specks of scarlet, like lingering traces of some bygone fête.

But, before we had climbed the hill, the rain came—a deliberate prelude of monstrous drops; and a veil, as of grey gauze, blurred the white-faced 35villas peopling the hill-sides, and changed the cypresses to dim, spiky sentinels....

It was Brother Agostino who came to the gate, greeting me, so I fancied, with a quick smile of recognition; then, before the groups of noisy village youths and raffish, Florentine cabmen, who encumbered the corridor, his features dropped back to the patient vacancy of habitual fatigue.

Over the tiled floor of the cloister-court rattled the dance of the rain; the great well, over-grown with rank grass, wore a forlorn, decrepit air; and a musty scent, as of approaching decay, floated over the vast garden.

In the chapel, a band of blatant Americans joined us, listening complacently to Brother Agostino’s perfunctory explanations concerning the frescoes, the stained-glass windows, the exquisite tomb of the monastery’s founder.

And the place seemed all changed: 36its fine distinction was gone: the old Certosa exposed to the hurried gaze of every passing tourist; and stern-faced Brother Agostino, footsore and weary, degraded to the rôle of a common, obsequious guide.

The morning’s breath tastes cool and clean. The distant hills seem yet asleep, tranquil and dark—a long, low, wavering wall. Above the plain floats a lingering, pearly film, and the air grows busy with a vague rumour of awakening life—the rumble of wheels, the cracking of whips, the plaintive whistling of far-off trains....

On its way to Florence the early train swings by; hordes of brown-skinned, barefooted children sprawl noisily along all the street; the men lean idly watching the ceaseless tale 37of lean barrocci, lumbering, jolting over the crooked flags; and before every open doorway the women group their chairs, to sit at their straw-plaiting the long day through....

Beyond, across the dusty-green of countless olives, you can see the glittering roofs of Florence, the Duomo’s burly dome, and the pale outline of Giotto’s tower; but it is rather the sense of old-world slowness, the continual accumulation of friendly, trivial incident, that makes the intimate charm of this suburban street....

The young moon hangs amid a steely sky; the land, empty and darkening, rolls like a billowing sea towards the Western orange glow; and high behind us the tall hill lifts Perugia’s ragged silhouette.

Down the steep road they came—grave 38bourgeois; bands of brown-faced youths, chewing thin cigars; aged peasant-women, with faded, wrinkled eyes; chattering country-girls, gaudy handkerchiefs around their hair; toddling children; uncouth men from the mountains, sullenly wrapped in fur-trimmed cloaks, while, posted in rows on either side, the crippled beggars offer their dusty hats, and whine for charity in the Virgin’s name.

Before the red gate of the Campo Santo the crowd surges; within, every alley is black with the press of people. It is the day of the dead. To visit the dead all the town is come.

... The pale specks of a myriad, tiny lamps; the glow of garlands against the crowding slabs of snow-white marble, that mark the children’s graves; the glitter of every small, spruce mortuary chapel; and the glad scent of freshly-scattered flowers....

39Death loses its squalor; and becomes something demure, sociable, almost gay....

Up the squalid, ill-paved street, lumber the great landaus—an interminable, toiling stream, carrying home from the corso the morose, sallow-faced ladies of the Neapolitan nobility, and crushing on either side the hedge of gaping hobbledehoys that line the niggardly pavement.

Heaped beneath us all Naples, white and motionless in the silent blaze of the midday sun; circling the bay, still and smooth and blue as the sky above, a misty line of white villages; dark, velvety shadows draping the hills; on the horizon, 40rising abruptly, Capri’s notched silhouette—tout semble suer la beauté—la bonne et franche beauté criarde des pays chauds européens.

A strip of treacherous pavement slimy with garbage; the wan flicker of foul lanterns, vaguely revealing the black shapes of sail-like awnings above a network of mysterious masts; and the sodden, continuous uproar of a reeking crowd—hawkers of fruit, of fish, of assorted cigar-ends—fiercely clamouring together in the darkness....

By-and-bye, through the obscurity, peers the glossy vermilion of piled capsicums, the scarlet sparkle of bleeding pomegranates, and the hard flashing of scattered, silvery sardines. Here and there, behind a chestnut-brazier that shoots long, 41licking tongues of ruddy flame, the vacant, battered countenance of some aged crone; or amid a frenzied cracking of whips the clattering passage of a team of trembling mules, straining at a lean-shafted, high-wheeled cart, passing across the street, to disappear, engulfed in cavernous blackness, beneath a noisome archway. Bands of sailors jostle their way down the alley, rudely rebuffing the obscene advances of slatternly women; the night grows airless and stifling, under the dingy stars that speckle the black strip of sky overhead; and the street comes to possess a satanic fascination, almost epic in its intensity....

The long line of lamps casts countless, trembling pillars of dusky gold into the sea: the night is full of stifled light—a pale, quivering 42suffusion of mysterious blue. The Castello d’Oro floats, black as ink, like a shapeless hulk; across the empty sky a solitary, ghostly cloud lies sleeping; somewhere, beyond the bay, the moonlight is dancing; and the rhythm of the sleek, rolling waves drowsily, lazily, rises and falls.

A boy and a girl lean together, watching the waves: some mandolines start a faint twanging; the distant rattle of a cab—then all is quiet; and the glow above Vesuvius, sullenly pulsing, alone breaks in upon the delicate serenity of the night....

I have been to many first-nights there, for I have found a certain childish charm in the small, shabby, blue-and-white theatre, the tiers of minute boxes, close-packed with faces, the noisy Neapolitan pit, and the inevitable 43row of callow critics, sucking their pencil-stumps, each with his hat tight-jammed behind his head.

But especially there lingers in my mind the memory of a certain brief, mediæval drama, where a little flaxen-haired lady, wearing a low-cut dress of arsenic-green satin, passionately implored mercy of a curly-pated knight in a shirt of maroon-coloured velvet, for a great wrong she had done him. She wept piteously, poor little creature, tearing tremulously at her fluffy locks, and on her knees appealing to us all to help her. But the little knight kept his wooden gaze obdurately averted from her, till, exhausted, she sank dying on to a gilt-legged couch.

The actors were only marionettes. The little lady was somewhat obviously painted, and the little knight stood a trifle stiffly, as if suffering slightly from stage-fright. But the pit sat the scene out in breathless 44silence, and the row of callow critics sucked their pencil-stumps with renewed vigour, and jammed their hats tighter behind their heads. For in some curious, inexplicable way the thing was quite moving—he was so brutal, the little curly-pated knight in his shirt of maroon-coloured velvet; and she, poor, sobbing, little flaxen-haired lady, pleaded so desperately....

Once before, in my childhood, through a half-closed door, I saw a girl plead with that same tense fragility. She, too, had flaxen hair, and wore a low-necked dress of green satin; and he, the man, stood stiffly, turning his gaze away from her, obdurately. And each scene, as I now compose them, seems to contain a kindred underlying element of grotesque unreality.

It was an old mill. There were white columns of peeling plaster flanking the granary, and stacks of frowsy brushwood blocking the door. Part of it had fallen away; tall, rank grass grew between the rottening rafters of the roof; and remnants of battered frescoes, that had once adorned the walls of the upper rooms, were now spread bare to sun and wind and rain. And the meal-troughs were full of blossoming wild-flowers. Beside the mill stood a small, square Moorish house, roofed with lava, scowling with dirt; and beside the house, guarding a public well, was a gaunt crane of mouldering wood. Across the sleekly rippling mill-stream a ragged peasant family were ranged the length of a strip of powdery soil—the father, the mother, two sons, four daughters, and a toddling child—and beyond them stretched the great dead-grey expanse of roofless walls—the sun-dried corpse of the 46ruined Roman town. In the twilight the sea lay towards Capri the colour of yellow mud; and Vesuvius, turning a vague, velvety black, was trickling his smoky breath towards the bay.

There was a great immobility in the air—an immobility that seemed born of long ages: and, somehow, more than the ruined town itself—defaced by German tourists and uniformed guides—this corner of the country supplied a bitter sense of shortness of life, the impassive sloth of time....

To gaze across the black sweep of sea, out into the mystery of the night; to hear the restless waves slowly sighing through the darkness, as they beat the rocks a thousand feet beneath; to love a little so, with quiet pressure of hands, 47and listlessly to ponder on strange meanings of life and love and death.

And so, amid a still serenity of dreamy sadness, to forget the mad turmoil of passion, to grow indifferent to all desire, and to wait, while the heart fills full of grave gratitude towards an unknown God.

And then, once more, to understand how life is but a little thing, and love but a passionate illusion, and to envy the sea her sighing in the days when the end shall have come.

The entertainment draws to its close, for it is past four in the morning. In the hall, several of the oil-lamps have already sputtered out; the rest are burning with dull, blear-eyed weariness. A score of unshaven Spaniards, close muffled in capas and lowering sombreros, sprawl in limp 48attitudes over the empty benches, and the circle of gaudy women that fill the stage sit listless, pasty-faced, somnolent.

And then, for the last time, the frenzy passes. The guitars start their sudden, bitter twanging, and the women their wild, rhythmical beating of hands.

Amid volleys of harsh, frenzied plaudits la Manolita dances, swaying her soft, girlish frame with a tense, exasperated restraint; supple as a serpent; coyly, subtly lascivious; languidly curling and uncurling her bare white arms.

Out in the cold night air, as I hasten home through the narrow, sleeping streets, her soft, girlish frame still sways before my eyes, to the bitter twanging of guitars.

To ride alone beneath the stars, through the long indefinite hours of the night; to climb the slumbering mountain-hulks; to hear the dull roar of the river, toiling unwearied through the darkness below; to break, with a sudden clattering of hoofs, the gloomy stillness of distant village-streets, and on through the twilight that precedes the dawn, to journey, without flagging, high up against the sky, across a desolate, limitless plain.

To scout the future; to unlearn the past; and to brood vaguely, as the night broods....

To elude desire; to disdain the thrill of hate; to forget the long aching of love, and to commune, in tender serenity, with the grave-eyed Spirit of Rest.

And then, while the night slinks away across the hills, to push on towards the sunrise; to watch the marshalling of ruddy heralds across 50the East, and at last to meet the Great God’s dazzling glory, bursting in splendour across the empty land.

We paced the bridge together, chatting till his watch should be done. The dim, uneasy outline of the steamer’s bows loomed before us; now and again we could feel her pulse quicken, her sinews tighten, as, like a living thing, she flinched from each lashing of the waves.

He was telling me tales of the yellow fever at Rio de Janeiro, of the crowd of vessels lying in the harbour without a soul on board, of six weeks he had spent in the hospital there, where twelve hundred fever-stricken creatures lay packed on the floor of a single ward, and the doctors dared only shout to the patients from behind a railed gangway.

51And, while he still talked, up from the East crept the first flicker of the dawn, revealing flocks of ruddy-sailed smacks tossing off the Spanish shore; then, slowly, the throng of black billows turned to reddish-green, and across the sky, from behind the African coast, poured a deep, blood-red stain. The mirage rose, lifting into space the low line of black hills, and the growing glow set a carpet of cloud ablaze, till it hung, stretched across the sky, like a vast awning of beaten, burnished copper.

I dreamed of an age grown strangely picturesque—of the rich enfeebled by monotonous ease; of the shivering poor clamouring nightly for justice; of a helpless democracy, vast revolt of the ill-informed; of priests striving to be rational; of sentimental moralists 52protecting iniquity; of middle-class princes; of sybaritic saints; of complacent and pompous politicians; of doctors hurrying the degeneration of the race; of artists discarding possibilities for limitations; of pressmen befooling a pretentious public; of critics refining upon the ’busman’s methods; of inhabitants of Camberwell chattering of culture.

And I dreamed of this great, dreamy London of ours; of her myriad fleeting moods; of the charm of her portentous provinciality; and I awoke all a-glad and hungering for life....

In the wan, lingering light of the winter afternoon, the park stood all deserted; sluggishly drowsing, so it seemed, with its spacious distances muffled in greyness; colourless, fabulous, blurred. One by one, through 53the damp, misty air, loomed the tall, stark, lifeless, elms. Overhead there lowered a turbid sky, heavy-charged with an unclean yellow. And, amid the ruddy patches of dank and rottening bracken, the little mare picked her way noiselessly. The rumour of life seemed hushed; there was only the vague, listless rhythm of the creaking saddle....

The daylight faded; a shroud of ghostly mist enveloped the earth, and up from the vaporous distance crept slowly the evening darkness....

It was New Year’s eve. The old, old scene. A London night; a heavy-brown atmosphere splashed with liquid, golden lights; the bustling market-place of sin; a silent crowd of black figures drifting over a wet, flickering pavement.

54The slow, grave notes from a church tower took command of the night. The last one faded: the old year had slipped by. And then a woman laughed—a strident, level laugh; and there swept through all the crowd a mad, feverish tremor. The women ran one to the other, kissing, wildly welcoming the New Year in; and the men, shouting thickly, snatched at them as they ran. And the cabmen touted eagerly for fares.

Across the road, by a corner, a street missionary stood on a chair—an undersized, poorly clad man, with a wizened, bearded face.

... “Repent ... repent ... and save your souls to-night from the eternal torments of hell-fire.”

The women jostled him, pelted him with foul gibes; and one—a young girl—broke into a peal of hysterical laughter.

And I mused wonderingly on the ugliness of sin.

A sullen glow throbs overhead: golden will-o’-wisps are threading their shadowy groupings of gaunt-limbed trees; and the dull, distant rumour of feverish London waits on the still, night air. The lights of Hyde Park corner blaze like some monster, gilded constellation, shaming the dingy stars; and across the East there flares a sky-sign—a gaudy, crimson arabesque.

And all the air hangs draped in the mysterious, sumptuous splendour of a murky London night....

The city disgorges.

All along the Strand, down the great, ebbing tide, the omnibuses, a congested press of gaudy craft, drift westwards, jostling and jamming their tall, loaded decks, with a clanking of chains, a rumble of lumbering wheels, 56a thudding of quick-loosed brakes, a humming of hammering hoofs....

The empty hansoms slink silently past; the street hawkers—a long row of dingy figures—line the pavement edge; troops of frenzied newsboys dart yelling through the traffic; and here and there a sullen-faced woman struggles to stem the tide of men.

Somewhere, behind Pall Mall, unheeded the sun has set: the sky is powdered with crimson dust; one by one the shops gleam out, blazing their windows of burnished glass; the twilight throbs with a ceaseless shuffle of hurrying feet; and over all things hovers the spirit of London’s grim unrest.

It was a little street, shabbily symmetrical—a double row of insignificant, dingy-brick houses. Muffled 57in the dusk of the fading winter afternoon, it seemed sunk in squalid, listless slumber. In the distance a church-bell was tolling its joyless mechanical Sunday tale.

A man stood in the roadway, droning the words of a hymn-tune. He was old and decayed and sluttish: he wore an ancient, baggy frock-coat, and, through the cracks in his boots, you could see the red flesh of his feet. His gait was starved and timid: the touch of the air was very bitter. And when he had finished his singing, he remained gazing up at the rows of lifeless windows, with a look of dull expectancy in his bloodshot, watery eyes.

The English Midlands, sluggishly effluent, a massy profusion of well-upholstered undulations; Normandy, 58coquettish, almost dapper, in its discreet rusticity, its finikin spruceness, its distinguished reticence of detail; the plains of Lombardy in midsummer, all glutted with luscious vegetation; Switzerland, tricked out in cheap sentimentality, in a catchpenny crudity of tone; Andalucia, savagely harsh, with its bitter, exasperated colouring....

In every country there links a personality, and the contemplation of the memories of the lands where one has lived, of the books one has cherished, of the women one has loved, brings with it a strange sense of the incomprehensible promptings of caprice.

With the fluctuations of mood, Musset seems puerile or passionate; Amiel, lachrymose or exquisitely perceptive; Baudelaire, macabre or impassively statuesque; Pater, tortuous or infinitely dexterous; Meredith, irksome or gorgeously prismatic.

There are women whom we worshipped 59years ago, who would certainly fail to move us to-day; books that enthralled us in our childhood, which we hesitate to open again; places we had read of with delight, and for that reason shrink from surveying.

And so to-night, beneath the lime-tree, by the dog-rose hedge, whilst the grasshoppers scrape their ceaseless chorus, and the flies roam like specks of gold, and the fawn-coloured cattle stalk home from the pastures, I wonder dreamily how I have come to love so steadfastly the whole wayward grace of this country-side—the melancholy of its wide plains, burnt to dun colour by the Southern sun; the desolate silence of those dark, endless pine forests that lie beyond; the hesitating contours of wooded slopes; the distant Pyrenees, a long, ragged, snow-capped wall; the dazzling-white roads, stretching between 60their tall, slim poplars, straight towards the horizon; the tumble-down, white-faced villages, huddled on the hilltops; their battered, sloping roofs, tilted all awry, like loose-fitting, peaked caps of faded-red tiles; the farmyards, strewn with dingy ox-bedding, and littered with a decrepit multitude of objects, which, it seems, can never have been new—broken earthenware pots, rickety, rush-bottomed chairs, stacks of dead branches, still rustling their brown, winter leaves; the slow-paced oxen ploughing the land; the peasants, men, women, and children, swaying in line as they sow the maize, with the poultry pecking behind; the jangling bells of the dilapidated, yellow-wheeled courier; the market-days, the sea of blue bérets, the press of blue blouses, the incoherent waving of ox-goads, the bristling of curved horns, the shifting mass of sleek, fawn-coloured backs; the narrow, ramshackle streets 61of the town; the line of plane-trees on the place d’armes, beneath which groups of grave bourgeois are for ever pacing; and the Gave, spurting over the rocks, under the old Norman bridge....

The sun slips behind a bank of inky cloud, slowly trailing its pale-green stain, and the old, penetrating charm of this tiny corner of the earth returns, and the old longing to bind myself to it, to have my place in its life, always, through the years to come....

The oxen have gone their way along the road; the lengthy twilight shadows steal across the garden; from the church-spire up on the hill the Angelus rings out; quite near at hand a tree-frog starts piping his shrill, clear note, and the cockchafers their angry whirling; and then, of a sudden, the violet night has fallen, 62wrapping all earth and sky in her mysterious, impenetrable blackness....

Have you never longed to wander there, in that wonderful cloudland beyond the sea, where, like droves of monstrous cattle, close-huddled and drowsy, they lie the day through—the comely, milk-white summer clouds, slow and sleek and swelling; the quick-scudding darkling clouds, tattered with travelling across the sky; the mighty thunder-clouds, violet and lowering; the flocks of fluffy-white baby clouds; and all the sun’s great gaudy guard, from the daintily gilded sunset spars to the blood-red bands that frequent the South?

Sometimes, at even-fall, when the sea lies calm in her opal tints, you 63may discern the distant lines of their strange, fantastic home, vague, phantasmagoric, like a mirage beyond the horizon.

Perhaps, after death, we may linger there, and watch them silently sail away towards the lands we have loved long ago!...

101

ADAMS (FRANCIS).

Essays in Modernity. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

A Child of the Age. (See Keynotes Series.)

ALLEN (GRANT).

The Lower Slopes: A Volume of Verse. With title-page and cover design by J. Illingworth Kay. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

The Woman Who Did. (See Keynotes Series.)

The British Barbarians. (See Keynotes Series.)

ARCADY LIBRARY (THE).

A Series of Open-Air Books. Edited by J. S. Fletcher. With cover designs by Patten Wilson. Each volume cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

103Vol. 1. Round About a Brighton Coach Office. By Maude Egerton King. With over 30 illustrations by Lucy Kemp-Welch.

Vol. 2. Scholar Gipsies. By John Buchan. With seven full-page etchings by D. Y. Cameron.

Vol. 3. Life in Arcadia. By J. S. Fletcher. Illustrated by Patten Wilson.

Vol. 4. A Garden of Peace. By Helen Crofton. With illustrations by Edmund H. New.

BEECHING (R. H. C.).

In a Garden: Poems. With title-page and cover design by Roger Fry. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

BEERBOHM (MAX).

The Works of Max Beerbohm. With a Bibliography by John Lane. Sq. 16mo. 4s. 6d. net.

BENSON (ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER).

Lyrics. Fcap. 8vo., buckram. 5s. net.

BODLEY HEAD ANTHOLOGIES (THE).

Edited by Robert H. Case. With title-page and cover designs by Walter West. Each volume cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

Vol. 1. English Epithalamies. By Robert H. Case.

Vol. 2. Musa Piscatrix. By John Buchan. With six etchings by E. Philip Pimlott.

Vol. 3. English Elegies. By John C. Bailey.

Vol. 4. English Satires. By Charles Hill Dick.

BRIDGES (ROBERT).

Suppressed Chapters and other Bookishness. Cr. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

BROTHERTON (MARY).

Rosemary for Remembrance. With title-page and cover design by Walter West. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

104CRANE (WALTER).

Toy Books. Re-issue. Each with new cover design and end papers. 9d. net.

I. This Little Pig.

II. The Fairy Ship.

III. King Luckieboy’s Party.

The group of three bound in one volume, with a decorative cloth cover, end papers, and a newly written and designed title-page and preface. 3s. 6d. net.

DALMON (C. W.).

Song Favours. With title-page designed by J. P. Donne. Sq. 16mo. 3s. 6d. net.

DAVIDSON (JOHN).

Plays: An Unhistorical Pastoral; A Romantic Farce; Bruce, a Chronicle Play; Smith, a Tragic Farce; Scaramouch in Naxos, a Pantomime. With a frontispiece and cover design by Aubrey Beardsley. Sm. 4to. 7s. 6d. net.

Fleet Street Eclogues. Fcap. 8vo., buckram. 4s. 6d. net.

Fleet Street Eclogues. Second Series. Fcap. 8vo., buckram. 4s. 6d. net.

A Random Itinerary and a Ballad. With a frontispiece and title-page by Laurence Housman. Fcap 8vo., Irish Linen. 5s. net.

Ballads and Songs. With title-page designed by Walter West. Fcap. 8vo., buckram. 5s. net.

DE TABLEY (LORD).

Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical. By John Leicester Warren (Lord De Tabley). Illustrations and cover design by C. S. Ricketts. Cr. 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical. 2nd series, uniform in binding with the former volume. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

EGERTON (GEORGE).

Keynotes. (See Keynotes Series.)

Discords. (See Keynotes Series.)

Young Ofeg’s Ditties. A translation from the Swedish of Ola Hansson. With title page and cover design by Aubrey Beardsley. Cr. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

105EVE’S LIBRARY.

Each volume cr. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

Vol. 1. Modern Women: an English Rendering of Laura Marholm Hansson’s ‘Das Buch der Frauen.’ By Hermione Ramsden. (Subjects:—Sonia Kovalevsky; George Egerton; Eleonora Duse; Amalie Skram; Marie Bashkirtseff; A. Ch. Edgren-Leffler.)

Vol. 2. The Ascent of Woman. By Roy Devereux.

Vol. 3. Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction. By Elizabeth Rachel Chapman.

FIELD (EUGENE).

The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac. Post 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

FLETCHER (J. S.).

The Wonderful Wapentake. By “A Son of the Soil.” With 18 full-page illustrations by J. A. Symington. Cr. 8vo. 5s. 6d. net.

Life in Arcadia. (See Arcady Library.)

FOUR AND SIX-PENNY NOVELS.

Each Volume with title-page and cover design by Patten Wilson. Cr. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

Galloping Dick. By H. B. Marriott Watson.

The Wood of the Brambles. By Frank Mathew.

The Sacrifice of Fools. By R. Manifold Craig.

A Lawyer’s Wife. By Sir Nevill Geary, Bart.

Weighed in the Balance. By Harry Lander.

Glamour. By Meta Orred.

Patience Sparhawk and Her Times. By Gertrude Atherton.

The Career of Delia Hastings. By H. B. Marriott Watson.

GALE (NORMAN).

Orchard Songs. With title-page and cover design by J. Illingworth Kay. Fcap. 8vo. Irish Linen. 5s. net.

Also a special edition, limited in number, on hand-made paper, bound in English vellum. £1. 1s. net.

106GARNETT (RICHARD).

Poems. With title-page by J. Illingworth Kay. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

Dante, Petrarch, Camoens. CXXIV Sonnets rendered in English. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

GIBSON (CHARLES DANA).

Pictures: Nearly One Hundred Large Cartoons. Oblong folio. 15s. net.

GOSSE (EDMUND).

The Letters of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Now first edited. Pott 8vo. 5s. net.

Also 25 copies large paper. 12s. 6d. net.

GRAHAME (KENNETH).

Pagan Papers: A Volume of Essays. With title-page by Aubrey Beardsley. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net.

The Golden Age. With cover designs by Charles Robinson. Cr. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

GREENE (G. A.)

Italian Lyrists of To-Day. Translations in the original metres from about 35 living Italian poets; with bibliographical and biographical notes. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

GREENWOOD (FREDERICK).

Imagination in Dreams. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

HAKE (T. GORDON).

A Selection from his Poems. Edited by Mrs. Meynell, with a portrait after D. G. Rossetti, and a cover design by Gleeson White. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

HAYES (ALFRED).

The Vale of Arden, and Other Poems. With a title-page and cover design by E. H. New. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

Also 25 copies large paper. 15s. net.

107HAZLITT (WILLIAM).

Liber Amoris; or, The New Pygmalion. Edited, with an Introduction, by Richard Le Gallienne. To which is added an exact transcript of the original MS., Mrs. Hazlitt’s diary in Scotland, and letters never before published. Portrait after Bewick, and facsimile letters. 400 copies only. 4to., 364 pp., buckram. 21s. net.

HEINEMANN (WILLIAM).

The First Step: A Dramatic Moment. Sm. 4to. 3s. 6d. net.

HOPPER (NORA).

Ballads in Prose. With a title-page and cover by Walter West. Sq. 16mo. 5s. net.

Under Quicken Boughs. With title-page designed by Patten Wilson. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

HOUSMAN (CLEMENCE).

The Were Wolf. With six full-page illustrations, title-page and cover design by Laurence Housman. Sq. 16mo. 3s. 6d. net.

HOUSMAN (LAURENCE).

Green Arras: Poems. With 6 illustrations, title-page, and cover design by the Author. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

IRVING (LAURENCE).

Godefroi and Yolande: A Play. Sm. 4to. 3s. 6d. net.

JAMES (W. P.).

Romantic Professions: A Volume of Essays. With title-page designed by J. Illingworth Kay. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

JOHNSON (LIONEL).

The Art of Thomas Hardy. Six Essays, with an etched portrait by Wm. Strang, and Bibliography by John Lane. Cr. 8vo. Buckram. 5s. 6d. net.

Also 150 copies, large paper, with proofs of the portrait. £1. 1s. net.

108JOHNSON (PAULINE).

The White Wampum: Poems. With title-page and cover designs by E. H. New. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

JOHNSTONE (C. E.).

Ballads of Boy and Beak. With a title-page designed by F. H. Townsend. Sq. 32mo. 2s. net.

KEYNOTES SERIES.

Each volume with specially-designed title-page by Aubrey Beardsley. Cr. 8vo. cloth. 3s. 6d. net.

Vol. I. Keynotes. By George Egerton.

Vol. II. The Dancing Faun. By Florence Farr.

Vol. III. Poor Folk. Translated from the Russian of F. Dostoievsky by Lena Milman, with a preface by George Moore.

Vol. IV. A Child of the Age. By Francis Adams.

Vol. V. The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light. By Arthur Machen.

Vol. VI. Discords. By George Egerton.

Vol. VII. Prince Zaleski. By M. P. Shiel.

Vol. VIII. The Woman who Did. By Grant Allen.

Vol. IX. Women’s Tragedies. By H. D. Lowry.

Vol. X. Grey Roses. By Henry Harland.

Vol. XI. At the First Corner, and Other Stories. By H. B. Marriott Watson.

Vol. XII. Monochromes. By Ella D’Arcy.

Vol. XIII. At the Relton Arms. By Evelyn Sharp.

Vol. XIV. The Girl from the Farm. By Gertrude Dix.

Vol. XV. The Mirror of Music. By Stanley V. Makower.

Vol. XVI. Yellow and White. By W. Carlton Dawe.

Vol. XVII. The Mountain Lovers. By Fiona Macleod.

Vol. XVIII. The Woman Who Didn’t. By Victoria Crosse.

Vol. XIX. The Three Impostors. By Arthur Machen.

109Vol. XX. Nobody’s Fault. By Netta Syrett.

Vol. XXI. The British Barbarians. By Grant Allen.

Vol. XXII. In Homespun. By E. Nesbit.

Vol. XXIII. Platonic Affections. By John Smith.

Vol. XXIV. Nets for the Wind. By Una Taylor.

Vol. XXV. Where the Atlantic Meets the Land. By Caldwell Lipsett.

Vol. XXVI. In Scarlet and Grey. By the Hon. Mrs. Arthur Henniker. (With a story, “The Spectre of the Real,” written in collaboration with Thomas Hardy).

Vol. XXVII. Maris Stella. By Marie Clothilde Balfour.

Vol. XXVIII. Morrison’s Heir. By Mabel E. Wotton.

Vol. XXIX. Shapes in the Fire. By M. P. Shiel.

Vol. XXX. Ugly Idol. By Claud Nicholson.

LANE’S LIBRARY.

Each volume cr. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

Vol. I. March Hares. By George Forth.

Vol. II. The Sentimental Sex. By Gertrude Warden.

Vol. III. Gold. By Annie Luden.

Vol. IV. The Sentimental Vikings. By R. V. Risley.

LEATHER (R. K.).

Verses. 250 copies, fcap. 8vo. 3s. net.

LE GALLIENNE (RICHARD).

Prose Fancies, with a portrait of the Author by Wilson Steer. Cr. 8vo., purple cloth. 5s. net.

Also a limited large paper edition. 12s. 6d. net.

The Book Bills of Narcissus. An account rendered by Richard le Gallienne. With a new chapter and a frontispiece, cr. 8vo., purple cloth. 3s. 6d. net.

Also 50 copies on large paper. 8vo. 10s. 6d. net.

110LE GALLIENNE (RICHARD).

English Poems. Revised. Cr. 8vo., purple cloth. 4s. 6d. net.

George Meredith: Some Characteristics; with a Bibliography (much enlarged) by John Lane, portrait, &c. Cr. 8vo., purple cloth. 5s. 6d. net.

The Religion of a Literary Man. Cr. 8vo., purple cloth. 3s. 6d. net.

Also a special rubricated edition on hand-made paper. 8vo. 10s. 6d. net.

Robert Louis Stevenson: An Elegy, and Other Poems, mainly personal. With etched title-page by D. Y. Cameron. Cr. 8vo., purple cloth. 4s. 6d. net.

Also 75 copies on large paper. 8vo. 12s. 6d. net.

Retrospective Reviews: A Literary Log, 1891–1895. 2 vols., cr. 8vo., purple cloth. 9s. net.

Prose Fancies. Second Series. Cr. 8vo., purple cloth. 5s. net.

See also Hazlitt, Liber Amoris, p. 6.

LUCAS (WINIFRED).

Units: Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

LYNCH (HANNAH).

The Great Galeoto, and Folly or Saintliness. Two Plays, from the Spanish of José Echegaray, with an Introduction. Sm. 4to. 5s. 6d. net.

MARZIALS (THEO.).

The Gallery of Pigeons, and Other Poems. Post 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

THE MAYFAIR SET.

Each volume fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

Vol. I. The Autobiography of a Boy. Passages selected by his friend G. S. Street. With a title-page designed by C. W. Furse.

Vol. II. The Joneses and the Asterisks: a Story in Monologue by Gerald Campbell. With title-page and six illustrations by F. H. Townsend.

111Vol. III. Select Conversations with an Uncle, now Extinct by H. G. Wells. With title-page by F. H. Townsend.

Vol. IV. For Plain Women Only. By George Fleming. With title-page by Patten Wilson.

Vol. V. The Feasts of Autolycus: the Diary of a Greedy Woman. Edited by Elizabeth Robins Pennell. With title-page by Patten Wilson.

Vol. VI. Mrs. Albert Grundy: Observations in Philistia. By Harold Frederic. With title-page by Patten Wilson.

MEREDITH (GEORGE).

The First Published Portrait of this Author, engraved on the wood by W. Biscombe Gardner, after the painting by G. F. Watts. Proof copies on Japanese vellum, signed by painter and engraver. £1. 1s. net.

MEYNELL (MRS.) (ALICE C. THOMPSON).

Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

A few of the 50 large paper copies (1st edition) remain. 12s. 6d. net.

The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

A few of the 50 large paper copies (1st edition) remain. 12s. 6d. net.

The Colour of Life, and other Essays. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

See also Hake.

MILLER (JOAQUIN).

The Building of the City Beautiful. Fcap. 8vo. With a decorated cover. 5s. net.

MONKHOUSE (ALLAN).

Books and Plays: a Volume of Essays on Meredith, Borrow, Ibsen, and others. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

112NESBIT (E.).

A Pomander of Verse. With a title-page and cover designed by Laurence Housman. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

In Homespun (See Keynotes Series).

NETTLESHIP (J. T.).

Robert Browning. Essays and Thoughts. With a portrait. Cr. 8vo. 5s. 6d. net.

NOBLE (JAS. ASHCROFT).

The Sonnet in England, and Other Essays. Title-page and cover design by Austin Young. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

Also 50 copies on large paper. 8vo. 12s. 6d. net.

O’SHAUGHNESSY (ARTHUR).

His Life and His Work. With selections from his Poems. By Louise Chandler Moulton. Portrait and cover design. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net.

OXFORD CHARACTERS.

A series of 24 lithographed Portraits by Will Rothenstein, with text by F. York Powell and others. 200 copies only, folio, buckram, £3. 3s. net.

25 special large paper copies containing proof impressions of the portraits signed by the artist. £6. 6s. net.

PETERS (WM. THEODORE).

Posies out of Rings. With title-page by Patten Wilson. Demy 16mo. 2s. net.

PIERROT’S LIBRARY.

Each volume with title-page, cover, and end papers designed by Aubrey Beardsley. Sq. 16mo. 2s. net.

Vol. I. Pierrot. By H. de Vere Stacpoole.

Vol. II. My Little Lady Anne. By Mrs. Egerton Castle.

Vol. III. Death, the Knight and the Lady. By H. de Vere Stacpoole.

Vol. IV. Simplicity. By A. T. G. Price.

Vol. V. My Brother. By Vincent Brown.

113PLARR (VICTOR).

In the Dorian Mood: Poems. With title-page designed by Patten Wilson. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

RADFORD (DOLLIE).

Songs, and Other Verses. With title-page designed by Patten Wilson. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

RHYS (ERNEST).

A London Rose and Other Rhymes. With title-page designed by Selwyn Image. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

RICKETTS (C. S.) AND C. H. SHANNON.

Hero and Leander. By Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman. With borders, initials, and illustrations designed and engraved on the wood by C. S. Ricketts and C. H. Shannon. Bound in English vellum and gold. 200 copies only. 35s. net.

ROBERTSON (JOHN M.).

Essays towards a Critical Method (New Series). Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

ST. CYRES (LORD).

The Little Flowers of St. Francis. A new rendering into English of the Fioretti di San Francesco. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

SHORE (LOUISA).

Poems. With a Memoir by Frederick Harrison.

STEVENSON (ROBERT LOUIS).

Prince Otto: A Rendering in French by Egerton Castle. With frontispiece, title page, and cover design by D. Y. Cameron. Cr. 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

Also 100 copies on large paper, uniform in size with the Edinburgh Edition of the works.

A Child’s Garden of Verses. With over 150 illustrations by Charles Robinson. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

114STODDART (THOMAS TOD).

The Death Wake. With an introduction by Andrew Lang. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net.

STREET (G. S.).

Miniatures and Moods. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. net.

Episodes. Cr. 8vo. 3s. net.

Quales Ego: A few Remarks, in particular and at large. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

The Autobiography of a Boy. (See Mayfair Set).

SWETTENHAM (F. A.).

Malay Sketches. With title and cover designs by Patten Wilson. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

TABB (JOHN B.).

Poems. Sq. 32mo. 4s. 6d. net.

TENNYSON (FREDERICK).

Poems of the Day and Year. With a title-page by Patten Wilson. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

THIMM (CARL A.).

A Complete Bibliography of Fencing and Duelling, as practised by all European Nations from the Middle Ages to the Present Day. With a Classified Index, arranged chronologically according to Languages. Illustrated with numerous portraits of Ancient and Modern Masters of the Art. Title-pages and frontispieces of some of the earliest works.

Portrait of the Author by Wilson Steer, and title-page designed by Patten Wilson. 4to. 21s. net.

THOMPSON (FRANCIS).

Poems. With frontispiece, title-page, and cover design by Laurence Housman. Pott 4to. 5s. net.

Sister-Songs: An Offering to Two Sisters. With frontispiece, title-page, and cover design by Laurence Housman. Pott 4to, buckram. 5s. net.

115THOREAU (HENRY DAVID).

Poems of Nature. Selected and edited by Henry S. Salt and Frank B. Sanborn. With a title-page designed by Patten Wilson. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

TRAILL (H. D.).

The Barbarous Britishers. A Tip-top Novel. With title and cover design by Aubrey Beardsley. Cr. 8vo. Wrapper, 1s. net.

From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier. With cover design by Patten Wilson. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

TYNAN HINKSON (KATHARINE).

Cuckoo Songs. With title-page and cover design by Laurence Housman. Fcap. 8vo. 5s. net.

Miracle Plays: Our Lord’s Coming and Childhood. With six illustrations, title-page and cover design by Patten Wilson. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

WALTON AND COTTON.

The Compleat Angler. A New Edition, edited by Richard Le Gallienne. With about 200 illustrations by Edmund H. New. To be issued in 12 monthly parts. Each 1s. net.

WATSON (ROSAMUND MARRIOTT).

Vespertilia, and Other Poems. With title-page designed by R. Anning Bell. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

A Summer Night and other Poems. New Edition. With a decorative title-page. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. net.

WATSON (WILLIAM).

The Father of the Forest, and Other Poems. With new photogravure portrait of the Author. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

Odes, and Other Poems. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

The Eloping Angels: a Caprice. Sq. 16mo, buckram. 3s. 6d. net.

116WATSON (WILLIAM).

Excursions in Criticism: being some Prose Recreations of a Rhymer. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

The Prince’s Quest, and Other Poems. With a bibliographical note added. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

The Purple East: A Series of Sonnets on England’s Desertion of Armenia. With a frontispiece by G. F. Watts, R. A. Wrapper, 1s. net.

WATT (FRANCIS).

The Law’s Lumber Room. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

WATTS (THEODORE).

Poems. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net.

WHARTON (H. T.).

Sappho. Memoir, text, selected renderings, and a literal translation by Henry Thornton Wharton. With three illustrations in photogravure and a cover design by Aubrey Beardsley. Fcap. 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Vignettes, by Hubert Crackanthorpe

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIGNETTES ***

***** This file should be named 60193-h.htm or 60193-h.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
        http://www.gutenberg.org/6/0/1/9/60193/

Produced by Richard Tonsing, hekula03, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from images made available by the
HathiTrust Digital Library.)

Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works

1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
1.E.8.

1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
you share it without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country outside the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:

  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
  United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you
  are located before using this ebook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
provided that

* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
  Literary Archive Foundation."

* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
  works.

* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
  receipt of the work.

* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm

Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
www.gutenberg.org



Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.

The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

For additional contact information:

    Dr. Gregory B. Newby
    Chief Executive and Director
    gbnewby@pglaf.org

Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate

Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.

Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.

Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org

This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.