grandmamma looked out just now in the twilight and said, “My dear Martyn, have you brought three boys down?” It was a showery, chilly evening, and they were all out admiring the waves.  Ulsters and sailor hats were appropriate enough then, but the genders were not easy to distinguish, especially as the elder girl wears her hair short—­no improvement to a keen face which needs softening.  She is much too like a callow undergraduate altogether, and her sister follows suit, though perhaps with more refinement of feature—­indeed she looks delicate, and was soon called in.  They are in slight mourning, and appear in gray serges.  They left a strap of books on the sofa, of somewhat alarming light literature for the seaside.  Bacon’s essays and elements of logic were the first Emily beheld, and while she stood regarding them with mingled horror and respect, in ran Avice to fetch them, as the two sisters are reading up for the Oxford exam—­’ination’ she added when she saw her two feeble-minded aunts looking for the rest of the word.  However, she says it is only Pica who is going up for it this time.  She herself was not considered strong enough.  Yet there have those two set themselves down with their books under the rocks, blind to all the glory of sea and shore, deaf to the dash and ripple of the waves!  I long to go and shout Wordsworth’s warning about ‘growing double’ to them.  I am glad to say that Uchtred has come and fetched Avice away.  I can hardly believe Martyn and Mary parents to this grown-up family.  They look as youthful as ever, and are as active and vigorous, and full of their jokes with one another and their children.  They are now gone out to the point of the rocks at the end of our promontory, fishing for microscopical monsters, and comporting themselves boy and girl fashion.

Isabel has meantime been chatting very pleasantly with grandmamma, and trying to extricate us from our bewilderment as to names and nicknames.  My poor mother, after strenuously preventing abbreviations in her own family, has to endure them in her descendants, and as every one names a daughter after her, there is some excuse!  This Oxford Margaret goes by the name of Pie or Pica, apparently because it is the remotest portion of Magpie, and her London cousin is universally known as Metelill—­the Danish form, I believe; but in the Bourne Parva family the young Margaret Druce is nothing worse than Meg, and her elder sister remains Jane.  “Nobody would dare to call her anything else,” says Isa.  Avice cannot but be sometimes translated into the Bird; while my poor name, in my second London niece, has become the masculine Charley.  “I shall know why when I see her,” says Isa laughing.  This good-natured damsel is coming out walking with us old folks, and will walk on with me, when grandmamma turns back with Emily.  Her great desire is to find the whereabouts of a convalescent home in which she and her cousins have subscribed to place a poor young dressmaker for a six weeks’ rest; but I am afraid it is on the opposite side of S. Clements, too far for a walk.