The Dean is little favored of the ordinary fashionable visitor, for whom artistic accommodations are quite too scantily luxurious.  Now and then, for the sake of the river, a rustic cot is taken for a few weeks by a party of boating-people.  Then the quaint, old-fashioned gardens blossom with a sudden luxuriance of striped tents and flaming umbrellas, while bright women in many-hued boating-costumes flit among cabbages and onions like curious tropical birds and butterflies.  As a rule, however, the Dean is abandoned to its usual rustic population and to artists, numbers of the latter remaining all winter in the haunts whence the majority of their kind have flown.

The social and artistic peculiarities of the Dean are, of course, too many to be specified.  In a collection of various nationalities, many of whose number have drifted like thistledown hither and yon over the fair earth, how could it well be otherwise?  It may be observed, however, that here, as everywhere else in this right little tight little isle, where habit is the very antithesis of the airy license of “Abroad,” it is not, as it is in the artistic haunts of the Continent, en regle to vaunt one’s self on the paucity of one’s shekels or to acknowledge acquaintance with the Medici’s pills in their modern form of the Three Golden Balls.

Once upon a time, in a Barbizon auberge, a certain famous artist and incorrigible Bohemian brought down the table by describing an incident of his releasing a friend’s valuables from durance.

“The moment I turned in at the Mont de Piete,” he said, “my watch took fright, and stopped ticking on the spot.”

That same Bohemian, after years of the Latin Quarter and Mont de Piete, found himself one summer on the Dean.  One evening at the porch of Ye Hutte he met a lively group of painters and paintresses, just returned from corn-field and meadow.

During the short halt the Bohemian’s watch was so largely and frequently en evidence as to attract attention.

“Yes,” he said, with colossal, adamantine impudence, “I’ve just got it back from a two-years’ visit to ’my uncle’.”

Only a few evenings later the same party met again in the same spot.

“What time is it, Mr. S——?” asked Sophia Primrose, amiably disposed to resuscitate a forlorn joke.

A mammoth blush submerged the luckless Bohemian.  For Dean propriety was already becoming engrafted upon Continental habit, and he crimsoned at having to confess what once he would have proclaimed upon the house-top,—­that his watch was again with his “uncle.”

Probably nine-tenths of the Continental artists who are not entirely beyond the dread of yet eating “mad cow” travel third-class.  But Dean artists, however they may travel when out of England, generally slip quietly away from the sight of their acquaintances when their tickets are other than at least second.  Our Bohemian was once presented with a second-class ticket to London.  As he scrambled in upon the unwonted luxury of cushioned seats, he saw familiar faces blushing furiously.