were so:  narrate them, and let readers do their reflections for themselves, she says, denouncing our conscientious method as the direct road downward to the dreadful modern appeal to the senses and assault on them for testimony to the veracity of everything described; to the extent that, at the mention of a vile smell, it shall be blown into the reader’s nostrils, and corking-pins attack the comfortable seat of him simultaneously with a development of surprises.  ‘Thither your conscientiousness leads.’

It is not perfectly visible.  And she would gain information of the singular nature of the young of the male sex in listening to the wrangle between Lord Fleetwood and Gower Woodseer on the subject of pocket-money for the needs of the Countess Carinthia.  For it was a long and an angry one, and it brought out both of them, exposing, of course, the more complex creature the most.  They were near a rupture, so scathing was Gower’s tone of irate professor to shirky scholar—­or it might be put, German professor to English scuffleshoe.

She is for the scene of ‘Chillon John’s’ attempt to restore the respiration of his bank-book by wager; to wit, that he would walk a mile, run a mile, ride a mile, and jump ten hurdles, then score five rifle-shots at a three hundred yards’ distant target within a count of minutes; twenty-five, she says; and vows it to have been one of the most exciting of scenes ever witnessed on green turf in the land of wagers; and that he was accomplishing it quite certainly when, at the first of the hurdles, a treacherous unfolding and waving of a white flag caused his horse to swerve and the loss of one minute, seven and twenty seconds, before he cleared the hurdles; after which, he had to fire his shots hurriedly, and the last counted blank, for being outside the circle of the stated time.

So he was beaten.  But a terrific uproar over the field proclaimed the popular dissatisfaction.  Presently there was a cleavage of the mob, and behold a chase at the heels of the fellow to rival the very captain himself for fleetness.  He escaped, leaving his pole with the sheet nailed to it, by way of flag, in proof of foul play; or a proof, as the other side declared, of an innocently premature signalizing of the captain’s victory.

However that might be, he ran.  Seeing him spin his legs at a hound’s pace, half a mile away, four countrymen attempted to stop him.  All four were laid on their backs in turn with stupefying celerity; and on rising to their feet, and for the remainder of their natural lives, they swore that no man but a Champion could have floored them so.  This again may have been due to the sturdy island pride of four good men knocked over by one.  We are unable to decide.  Wickedness there was, the Dame says; and she counsels the world to ‘put and put together,’ for, at any rate, ’a partial elucidation of a most mysterious incident.’  As to the wager-money, the umpires dissented; a famous quarrel, that does not concern us here, sprang out of the dispute; which was eventually, after great disturbance ’of the country, referred to three leading sportsmen in the metropolitan sphere, who pronounced the wager ‘off,’ being two to one.  Hence arose the dissatisfied third party, and the letters of this minority to the newspapers, exciting, if not actually dividing, all England for several months.