“But I would go on the most reasonable terms.  I would go for as low as ten pounds a month and my expenses.”

“Would you go for nothing?” Bunker wakes up and pops this out at him so suddenly as to quite take his breath away.

He expands his hands at his trousers pockets, shrugs his shoulders and looks volumes of reproach.

“Because,” Bunker adds, in a soothing tone, “I shouldn’t like to have you along, even at that price.”

He immediately goes to putting the room to rights.

“Horrible breath that man had,” says Bunker when we come out:  “did you notice it?”

“Yes.”

“Take that breath around with us on the Continent!  Why, if he was in Cologne itself, his breath would be in the majority.”

I had my umbrella in the billiard-room, and next morning I can’t find it anywhere.  At breakfast I ask the pompous head-waiter if he knows of my umbrella.  He states that he does not.  After breakfast I look in the billiard-room.  It is not there.  I go down to the office, and interrupt the worsted work there in progress by requesting that a search be made for my missing umbrella.  The young lady whose ear I have gained kindly condescends to call the porter, and turning me over to that functionary returns to her worsted.  The porter is respectful, but doubtful.  The moment he learns that the lost article is an umbrella his manner is pervaded with a gentle hopelessness.  He, however, listens forbearingly to my story.

“And aboot what time was it, sir, when ye went ty bed?”

“About half-past eleven.”

“Oh, then the night porter ull know of it, sir.  He’s abed now.  I’ll ask him when he gets oop.”

And so, when we go to Netley Abbey, I take a covered cab, because of my lost umbrella.  It was a beautiful umbrella to keep off the sun.  Nobody can make an umbrella like an Englishman.  I should be sorry to lose it.  I bought it in Regent street only a few days ago, but I already love it with a passionate affection.

Through the hot paved streets, over a floating bridge, past the cliff at the river’s mouth, through a shady grove of noble yews and sycamores, past a picturesque hamlet full of vine-curtained and straw-thatched cottages, through a forest of oaks and past a willow copse, and there is the grand old ruin of Netley Abbey lifting its picturesque and solemn fingers of ivy-hung stone above the tops of the trees which surround and shelter it in its hoary age.

It is really curious how dramatically effective a grand old ruin is.  The weird sense of being in the presence of olden time comes over us immediately.  We look about us to see the spirit of some cloistered monk come stealing by with hood and girdle.  Here—­actually here, in these nooks all crumbling under Time’s gnawing tooth—­did old Cistercian monks kneel with shaved heads and confess their sins, and their bones have been powdered into dust three hundred