“I’ll think of it.  I have never traveled in the character of a nuisance yet—­at least, so far as I know—­and it would be a new sensation:  that is a great inducement.”

Lady Arthur rushed to Miss Adamson’s room with the news, and the two ladies had first a cry and then a laugh over it.  “Alice will be duchess yet,” said Lady Arthur:  “that boy’s life has hung so long by a thread that he must be prepared to go, and he would be far better away from the cares and trials of this world, I am sure;” which might be the truth, but it was hard to grudge the boy his life.

Lady Arthur was in brilliant spirits at dinner that evening.  “I suppose you are going to live on love,” she said.

“I am going to work for my living,” said George.

“Very right,” she said; “but, although I got better last year, I can’t live for ever, and when I’m gone Alice will have the Garscube estates:  I have always intended it.”

“Madam,” said George, “do you not know that the great lexicographer has said in one of his admirable works, ’Let no man suffer his felicity to depend upon the death of his aunt’?”

It is said that whenever a Liberal ministry comes in Mr. Eildon will be offered the governorship of one of the colonies.  Lady Arthur may yet live to be astonished by his “career,” and at least she is not likely to regret her dying letter.

THE AUTHOR OF “BLINDPITS.”

THE HOUSE ON THE BEACH.

“What is that black mass yonder, far up the beach, just at the edge of the breakers?”

The fisherman to whom we put the question drew in his squid-line, hand over hand, without turning his head, having given the same answer for half a dozen years to summer tourists:  “Wreck.  Steamer.  Creole.”

“Were there many lives lost?”

“It’s likely.  This is the worst bit of coast in the country, The Creole was a three-decker,” looking at it reflectively, “Lot of good timber there.”

As we turned our field-glasses to the black lump hunched out of the water, like a great sea-monster creeping up on the sand, we saw still farther up the coast a small house perched on a headland, with a flag flying in the gray mist, and pointed it out to the Jerseyman, who nodded:  “That there wooden shed is the United States signal station;” adding, after a pause, “Life-saving service down stairs.”

“Old Probabilities!  The house he lives in!”

“Life-boats!”

Visions of the mysterious old prophet who utters his oracles through the morning paper, of wrecks and storms, and of heroic men carrying lines through the night to sinking ships, filled our brains.  Townspeople out for their summer holiday have keen appetites for the romantic and extraordinary, and manufacture them (as sugar from beets) out of the scantiest materials.  We turned our backs on the fisherman and his squid-line.  The signal station and the hull of the lost vessel were only a shed and timber to him.  How can any man be alive to the significance of a wreck and fluttering flag which he sees twenty times a day?  Noah, no doubt, after a year in the ark, came to look upon it as so much gopher-wood, and appreciated it as a good job of joinery rather than a divine symbol.