angry glance with one of admiration, and quite unabashed.  ’What’ll you take for it?  I’ve sat under him for five years; and for taking texteses from one end of the Bible to the other, and leading in prayer, and filling the mourners’ bench in five minutes, I will say he hasn’t got his equal in the universe.  He’s got a towering intellect, I tell you.  I’ll give you fifty cents for this, if you’ll color it up nice for me and throw in a frame.’  Of course I took the picture away from the brazen creature and told her what I thought of her conduct.  ‘Well, you air techy,’ she said, and walked off leisurely.”  Before closing her letter, Mrs. Sykes remarked of her hostess, “Quite good for nothing physically, and absurdly romantic.  She has been abroad a good deal, and bores me dreadfully with her European reminiscences.  She is always talking in a foolish, rapturous sort of way about ’dear Melrose,’ or ‘noble Tintern Abbey,’ or ‘enchanting Warwick Castle;’ and she has read simply libraries of books about England, and puts me through a sort of examination about dozens of places and events, as though I could carry all England about in my head.  I really know less of it than of most other countries:  there is nothing to be got by running about it.  If one knew every foot of it, everybody would think it a matter of course; but to be able to talk of Siam and the Fiji Islands, Cambodia and Alaska, and the like, is really an advantage in society.  One gets the name of being a great traveller, and all that, and is asked about tremendously and taken up to a wonderful extent.  I know a man that didn’t wish to go to the trouble and expense of rambling all over the world, and wanted the reputation of having done it, so he went into lodgings at intervals near the British Museum and got all the books that were to be had about a particular country, and, having read them, would come back to the West End and give out that he had been there.  It answered beautifully for a while, and he was by way of being asked to become a Fellow of the Royal Geographical, and was thought quite an authority and wonderfully clever; but somehow he got found out, which must have been a nuisance and spoiled everything.  I can see that these people consider it quite an honor to have me visit them, all because of my having been around the world, I dare say.  And of course I have let them see that I know who is who and what is what.  They are imploring me to stay on; but I told them yesterday that it wouldn’t suit my book at all to stay over two weeks longer, when I had seen all there was to see.  That young Ramsay seems to be enjoying himself out there among those nasty savages; and, as hunting is about the only thing he is fit for, he had best stay out there altogether.”