‘For,’ says Dr. Gannius, as if divining them, ’this excessive and applauded productiveness, both of your juvenile and your senile, in your modern literature, is it ever a crop?  Is it even the restorative perishable stuff of the markets?  Is it not rather your street-pavement’s patter of raindrops, incessantly in motion, and as fruitful?’ Mr. Semhians appeals to Delphica.  ‘Genius you have,’ says she, stiffening his neck-band, ’genius in superabundance’:—­he throttles to the complexion of the peony:—­’perhaps criticism is wanting.’  Dr. Gannius adds:  ’Perhaps it is the drill-sergeant everywhere wanting for an unrivalled splendid rabble!’

Colney left the whole body of concurrents on the raised flooring of a famous New York Hall, clearly entrapped, and incited to debate before an enormous audience, as to the merits of their respective languages.  ’I hear,’ says Dr. Bouthoin to Mr. Semhians (whose gape is daily extending), ‘that the tickets cost ten dollars!’

There was not enough of Delphicafor Nests.

Colney asked:  ‘Have you seen any of our band?’

‘No,’ she said, with good cheer, and became thoughtful, conscious of a funny reason for the wish to hear of the fictitious creature disliked by Dudley.  A funny and a naughty reason, was it?  Not so very naughty:  but it was funny; for it was a spirit of opposition to Dudley, without an inferior feeling at all, such as girls should have.

Colney brought his viola for a duet; they had a pleasant musical evening, as in old days at Creckholt; and Nesta, going upstairs with the ladies to bed, made them share her father’s amused view of the lamb of the flock this bitter gentleman became when he had the melodious instrument tucked under his chin.  He was a guest for the night.  Dressing in the early hour, Nests saw him from her window on the parade, and soon joined him, to hear him at his bitterest, in the flush of the brine.  ’These lengths of blank-faced terraces fronting sea!’ were the satirist’s present black beast.  ’So these moneyed English shoulder to the front place; and that is the appearance they offer to their commercial God!’ He gazed along the miles of ‘English countenance,’ drearily laughing.  Changeful ocean seemed to laugh at the spectacle.  Some Orphic joke inspired his exclamation:  ‘Capital!’

‘Come where the shops are,’ said Nesta.

‘And how many thousand parsons have you here?’

‘Ten, I think,’ she answered in his vein, and warmed him; leading him contemplatively to scrutinize her admirers:  the Rev. Septimus; Mr. Sowerby.

‘News of our friend of the whimpering flute?’

‘Here? no.  I have to understand you!’

Colney cast a weariful look backward on the ‘regiments of Anglo-Chinese’ represented to him by the moneyed terraces, and said:  ’The face of a stopped watch!—­the only meaning it has is past date.’

He had no liking for Dudley Sowerby.  But it might have been an allusion to the general view of the houses.  But again, ’the meaning of it past date,’ stuck in her memory.  A certain face close on handsome, had a fatal susceptibility to caricature.