face was disfigured.  Across her nose was the dark purple that comes with overpowering fear.  Haydon saw it on the face of a woman whose child had just been run over in a London street.  I remembered the note in his journal as the woman at Via Reggio, in her intolerable hour, turned her head my way, her sobs lifting it.  She was afraid that the man would throw himself under the train.  She was afraid that he would be damned for his blasphemies; and as to this her fear was mortal fear.  It was horrible, too, that she was humpbacked and a dwarf.

Not until the train drew away from the station did we lose the clamour.  No one had tried to silence the man or to soothe the woman’s horror.  But has any one who saw it forgotten her face?  To me for the rest of the day it was a sensible rather than a merely mental image.  Constantly a red blur rose before my eyes for a background, and against it appeared the dwarf’s head, lifted with sobs, under the provincial black lace veil.  And at night what emphasis it gained on the boundaries of sleep!  Close to my hotel there was a roofless theatre crammed with people, where they were giving Offenbach.  The operas of Offenbach still exist in Italy, and the little town was placarded with announcements of La Bella Elena.  The peculiar vulgar rhythm of the music jigged audibly through half the hot night, and the clapping of the town’s-folk filled all its pauses.  But the persistent noise did but accompany, for me, the persistent vision of those three figures at the Via Reggio station in the profound sunshine of the day.

POCKET VOCABULARIES

A serviceable substitute for style in literature has been found in such a collection of language ready for use as may be likened to a portable vocabulary.  It is suited to the manners of a day that has produced salad-dressing in bottles, and many other devices for the saving of processes.  Fill me such a wallet full of ‘graphic’ things, of ‘quaint’ things and ‘weird,’ of ‘crisp’ or ‘sturdy’ Anglo-Saxon, of the material for ’word-painting’ (is not that the way of it?), and it will serve the turn.  Especially did the Teutonic fury fill full these common little hoards of language.  It seemed, doubtless, to the professor of the New Literature that if anything could convince him of his own success it must be the energy of his Teutonisms and his avoidance of languid Latin derivatives, fit only for the pedants of the eighteenth century.  Literature doubtless is made of words.  What then is needful, he seems to ask, besides a knack of beautiful words?  Unluckily for him, he has achieved, not style, but slang.  Unluckily for him, words are not style, phrases are not style.  ‘The man is style.’  O good French language, cunning and good, that lets me read the sentence in obverse or converse as I will!  And I read it as declaring that the whole man, the very whole of him, is his style.  The literature