very worthy persons, been arrested and brought before a magistrate, who dismissed her with a warning to her relations that she had better be sent home to Devonshire and ‘looked after’.  Susan Flood’s return to us, however, was a triumph; she had no sense of having acted injudiciously or unbecomingly; she was ready to recount to every one, in vague and veiled language, how she had been able to testify for the Lord ‘in the very temple of Belial’, for so she poetically described the Crystal Palace.  She was, of course, in a state of unbridled hysteria, but such physical explanations were not encouraged amongst us, and the case of Susan Flood awakened a great deal of sympathy.

There was held a meeting of the elders in our drawing-room to discuss it, and I contrived to be present, though out of observation.  My Father, while he recognized the purity of Susan Flood’s zeal, questioned its wisdom.  He noted that the statuary was not her property, but that of the Crystal Palace.  Of the other communicants, none, I think, had the very slightest notion what the objects were that Susan had smashed, or tried to smash, and frankly maintained that they thought her conduct magnificent.  As for me, I had gathered by persistent inquiry enough information to know that what her sacrilegious parasol had attacked were bodies of my mysterious friends, the Greek gods, and if all the rest of the village applauded iconoclastic Susan, I at least would be ardent on the other side.

But I was conscious that there was nobody in the world to whom I could go for sympathy.  If I had ever read ‘Hellas’ I should have murmured

    Apollo, Pan and Love,
    And even Olympian Jove,
  Grew weak, when killing Susan glared on them.

On the day in question, I was unable to endure the drawing-room meeting to its close, but, clutching my volume of the Funereal Poets, I made a dash for the garden.  In the midst of a mass of laurels, a clearing had been hollowed out, where ferns were grown and a garden-seat was placed.  There was no regular path to this asylum; one dived under the snake-like boughs of the laurel and came up again in absolute seclusion.

Into this haunt I now fled to meditate about the savage godliness of that vandal, Susan Flood.  So extremely ignorant was I that I supposed her to have destroyed the originals of the statues, marble and unique.  I knew nothing about plaster casts, and I thought the damage (it is possible that there had really been no damage whatever) was of an irreparable character.  I sank into the seat, with the great wall of laurels whispering around me, and I burst into tears.  There was something, surely, quaint and pathetic in the figure of a little Plymouth Brother sitting in that advanced year of grace, weeping bitterly for indignities done to Hermes and to Aphrodite.  Then I opened my book for consolation, and I read a great block of pompous verse out of ‘The Deity’, in the midst of which exercise, yielding to the softness of the hot and aromatic air, I fell fast asleep.