comes up to golden London to practise it. His grandchildren, without ambition, loving cheap pleasures and hating regular work, take little jobs as they come, and are transformed, succinctly, into the Yard. Nobody in it knows a trade; there seems no special reason why anybody in it should be able to earn enough to live. Yet there they have lived for ten years, and will most likely live for ten more. Improvement schemes have skipped over the Yard, and so has everything else; it cares nothing for politics or art or trade-unionism or religion or any of the things we suppose to be important-only for the penny-inthe slot gas system, for the weather as it affects. road-making, the coal sales, or house painting, and for births, marriages, and deaths. Births neverceasing, marriages early yet anticipated, deaths treading on the heels of births and as lightly regarded--these complete the simple, typical, uninstructive saga of the Yard.

A WET afternoon in the season-and what could be more discccsolate! Through the weeping glass of the bamso there was no prospect, save sootluckened, mad-streaming, empty streets. No City looks gay on such a day, but none ever locks so ficbornly gloomy as London. In Faris there would be bright eclours of advertisement and sheets of looking-glass to relieve the monotone of road and pavement, wall and window. In London, on such a day, even gold and scarlet look grey, and mirrors fol no light to refect withal In Paris or Berlin or Vienna you would have seen café-fronts, under verandahs, alive with people sipping and puffing the storm away; in London there is a drowned rat of an errand-boy plashing across the street, a well-dressed couple swimming through the closed and cascading window of a trongham-for the rest, nothing. The place might be asleep or dead In Lodia we are

civilised enough to fear a wetting, and barbarous enough to have no other way of keeping dry but to stay at home.

Presently two cabs appeared together, then three; and under the cheerless face of the Albert Hall huddled a whole tail of them. Through puddles I went in-and behold! an Empire ballet in full swing! Up above were the boxes and circles, familiarly dusky, and the dish-cover roof. But below, the stalls had all disappeared, under a stage floor of yielding planks. All round the floor, and in the middle of it, were little kiosques, bowers of drapery, arbours of drooping silk and muslin in every soft and tender colour known beneath the sun. National ensigns surmounted them, and they were filled and lined and festooned with fabrics and china and bonnets and books and table-napkins and every abstruse kind of bric-à-brac. In and among the kiosques, mostly carrying bric-a-brac also, were scores of beautiful ladies. Only! why at the Albert Hall instead of in Leicester Square? Well: it was, as you have guessed, a bazaar in aid of a hospital.

At the first sight of it, who so proud as the Londoner? What other city on earth could show such women? Well-grown, well-nourished, wellgroomed, well-dressed, and supremely beautiful, they made such a show as could be seen nowhere else out of dreams. Paris could not approach it; Vienna

To

perhaps would come nearest. But if the ladies of Vienna are as well-nourished, well-groomed, welldressed, they are less divinely tall and, to the British eye at least, less fair. The surprise, almost the shock, of the spectacle was the height of the wealthy young women of London. Everybody knows some very tall young women; but here there seemed no short ones. They seemed not merely far taller than their mothers, but much taller than their brothers also. I had always persuaded myself that five-foot-nine was a convenient and seemly middle-height for a man, but among these sweeping goddesses I was a dwarf. be tall nowadays a girl must fall hardly short of six feet. I suppose it comes of more exercise in the open air, together with good food; certainly the poorer classes, whether in town or country, do not show the same phenomenon. Unless samplers and walks with a governess should come in again, we shall be overrun in a generation with a breed of giantesses, and what will man do then, poor thing? As for beauty, everybody has his own standard: and faultless profiles, fine eyes, brilliant hair are happily not so uncommon. But in the last perfection of colouring and texture of skin these beauties were supreme. Paint and powder may be the vogue, especially among those whose complexions these very things have ruined; yet most showed cheeks like rose-petals. An eye greedy for faults might find

them in the perchance over-straight lines of the modern figure; the faces were beyond criticism.

A little cold-blooded, you will be thinking, this appraisement of gracious ladies at a work of charity, as if they were horses at a show. But that was just the distressing point of view that ten minutes in the place forced you to take. It was you distressfully perceived-it was a rank-and-beauty-andfashion show, and little else. You did not come to help the great hospital; a cheque would have done that more conveniently. You paid a guinea (or whatever it was) to look at the most beautiful women in London, and, if you had guineas enough, it was well worth it. If you wanted more for your money there was a duke upstairs in the white linen jacket of a bar-tender, selling American drinks. A duke in a white linen jacket selling cocktails-and they talk of abolishing the House of Lords! And I wonder what his grandfather would say if he could hear of it.

The public paid to see the show; the assistants— there were at least twice as many assistants this afternoon as there were public-came apparently to amuse themselves. Playing at being a waitress, a shop-girl, a flower-girl, picnicking a couple of days at the Albert Hall-it was immense fun. It must be said that they did the business quite as well as their prototypes. They hawked up and down, hauled the