It would be distinctly opposed to the policy of the Vatican, and too much pressure is brought to bear upon him from without, whatever his private opinions may now be. He is as well aware as I am, too, that were he to change his present policy he would not survive it for many days. The Vatican is "run" upon strictly medieval lines'

My look of inquiry interrupted him. Was this a euphemism, I wondered, for the cup of black coffee' that was said to come in so useful sometimes at Yildiz Kiosk (which is certainly 'run' also 'upon strictly medieval lines')? Of course, like most people, I had heard the story of a late Cardinal-Prince and the basket of fruit which was sent to him as a present from the Vatican gardens, and of the tragic fate of his maître d'hôtel, who rashly ate up the fig that he had decided would make one too many for the dish. I bought two large scentbottles at the sale of the said Cardinal's effects (the princely crown, combined with the 'hat,' looks very imposing upon the gilt stoppers); but although I never look at them without thinking of the fatal fig, I have made it a rule to swallow all such legends' with a grain of salt,' particularly at a place where the current of party spirit—I might even say of 'party spite-runs as high as it does at Rome. After .. all, why might not the Prince-Cardinal's butler have died of appendicitis like anybody else? . . .

'You have mistaken my meaning,' said my friend, assuming a more cautious tone. What I intended to say was, that were the Pope to change his habits, or his place of residence, it would inevitably prove fatal to him at his great age. How many elderly persons succumb daily to the "change of air" that has been recommended by their physician? Then, too, he is a vain man, and he could never endure to admit that his original policy had been unwise. The chagrin resulting from such an admission would kill him.’

Possibly these medieval lines' may be the only ones upon which anything so time-honoured and mystical as the Papacy can be run in this material age; and possibly the late Pope, if he was really so vain,' thought that he had at least a good deal to be vain of. He was without doubt a man of culture and refinement; apt in argument and repartee; an unusually proficient Latin scholar, and a keen and crafty politician, although, as a matter of course, a very one-sided .one. He loved riches and pageants, possessed beautiful hands and glittering eyes, and wrote very creditable verses both in Italian and Latin. I have read a poem of his upon the subject of photography. The theme does not seem to promise much, but he managed to extract something really poetical out of these sun-painted pictures.' He was afflicted rather painfully with the smile that is smiled indiscriminately, at all times and seasons, and that has the appearance of being purely mechanical. Sometimes, in the case of aged persons, this may be partly due to unsuccessful dental arrangements, and so it may wreathe the lips of those who should not be held responsible for it.

Pope Leo the Thirteenth is smiling now, as he appears before me in my day-dream, but he looks pale and faltering, and Mr. Blunt leads him off gently, and takes him inside the shop of the adjacent butterman.

'Wilfrid Blunt is one of those uncomfortable people who must always be of the minority,' says a voice from the inner depths of the omnibus. 'He won't come in here because we have got in before him, and he won't allow the Pope to do so either. He wants an omnibus all to himself. And what will you bet, too, that he has not gone into the butterman's in order to astonish him by asking for camel's milk, or some other unobtainable product? He has ever been, and ever will be, an "homme à sensation."'

I look towards the window of the dairy company, and perceive, over the horns of the symbolic statuette, the subject of these remarks in the act of offering a glass of milk to his aged companion, though whether of cow or camel I can do no more at that distance than shrewdly conjecture. The appearance of the Pope, as he stands there in his shabby black garments, being ministered to by one seemingly so superior to himself as a specimen of humanity, is so grotesquely at variance with all preconceived tradition that, in spite of myself, I cannot help laughing aloud.

This laugh proved the death-knell of my vision, though not before I had convinced myself of a truth about which I had previously been rather doubtful. The late Pontiff would have been remarkablelooking anywhere, and he was quite entitled to a place in my omnibus had not untoward circumstances prevented. Now, however, it is completely full, and although I can still see several well-known and remarkable figures making towards it from a distance (the bland and débonnaire apostle of 'Sweetness and Light' amongst others, and Mr. George Meredith, with his magnificent facial angles), all wildly flourishing their umbrellas, a mysterious-looking individual, wearing the leathern jerkin and demi-mask of the traditional headsman, leaps lightly on to the box-seat, seizes the reins, and, cracking his whip in Continental fashion, drives off at a brisk pace and is no more seen, for even a dream-omnibus is not bound to be indefinitely elastic.

Suddenly I became aware of my actual surroundings, and I perceived that the irrelevant lady, who had evidently come into the room whilst I was still in the clouds, had risen from her chair, and was hastily collecting her worsted work as though to escape from the presence of one whom she regarded as a lunatic.

'The late Pope looked so funny in that "bowler" hat,' I said in explanation, whereupon her countenance only betrayed an expression of still greater alarm, and I then endeavoured to make her understand the turn my imagination had taken.

Just then the rest of the company came trooping in, and I submitted my little extravaganza to them with a good deal of nervous misgiving.

Everybody was agreed that I had certainly made out my case, and that if an ordinary 'outsider' were to get into my omnibus he would at once discover, merely from looking at its occupants, that he was in the presence of his intellectual superiors.

'Still, you gave me so very little time,' I said, excusing myself, and subjected me to such stern limitations. Not one of the heroes of Antiquity, or even of the Middle Ages, and only people I had actually spoken to and seen quite near! . . . I might have brought in Thackeray, who was so remarkable-looking, and to whom I sat next, once, at the play; or Victor Hugo, whom I looked at from a yacht through a telescope, and saw quite distinctly; or Walt Whitman, who sent me a lifelike photograph of himself with his signature at the bottom, if I hadn't been so dreadfully conscientious! . . . I have left out a whole lot of remarkable-looking friends, too; people who have asked me to dinner and been so civil to me, to say nothing of all my own relations. . . . And then, although somehow I couldn't prevent the late Pope from making his appearance, I had to draw the line at kings and queens, because it is impossible to divest royal personages of their accumulation of prestige, or to judge quite fairly of them in any way. . . .

'But, after all,' interrupted the irrelevant lady, 'kings and queens are only mortal. They are made of just the same flesh and blood as the rest of us!' and she heaved a profound sigh.

'A fact that should be continually borne in mind,' said the Scoffer, or we might possibly lose sight of it altogether.'

And then,' I continued, there are a great many more things I might have said about everybody, if I had not been afraid of being "too offensively personal" (as Mr. Harry Quilter said of Mr. Whistler). Some people can't even laugh at themselves, and won't stand the least little bit of ridicule, or even of playful treatment, from others!'

'Do you really think,' asked the Seeker, 'that anything can seem to be "too personal" after "the Creevey Papers "?"

But now,' said the Scoffer, before anybody could answer this question, what are we to say about those people who, although extremely remarkable-looking, have never been fortunate enough to distinguish themselves in any way whatsoever?'

As he spoke, the company, one and all, glanced, as though instinctively, towards a looking-glass hanging on the opposite side of the room, and which was almost as large as the butterman's window in my day-dream. The question had occurred to me already, and was certainly something of a poser.

"Their future is in their own hands,' I ventured at last. They have only to try earnestly, night and day, to live up to their personal appearance.' The luncheon-gong sounded as I spoke, and so our morning's fooling was brought to an end.

MARY MONTGOMERIE CURRIE.

1904

THE BY-LAW TYRANNY AND RURAL

DEPOPULATION

A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

I AM a landowner in a poor agricultural district of Sussex, having an estate of some four thousand acres, mostly of woodland, in the Weald. The estate, as I inherited it, had been got together as long ago as the Civil Wars, and had remained without much change as to acreage since, though here and there fields and farms have been bought or exchanged or sold. I can see by old plans and records that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was much more closely peopled than now. There were then a number of small freeholds, of from three to thirty acres, interspersing it, which have now disappeared.

The question of this disappearance of the rural population has always interested me. Its earliest cause was, I believe, the ruin of the iron industry, which, about the reign of Queen Anne, began to be abandoned owing to the competition of the coalfields of the North. This diminished the wealth of the district and drove out a number of the Sussex miners from the parishes where their work lay, while others became squatters on the wastes of manors and took to smuggling, sheep-stealing, and other ill-practices. During the latter half of the eighteenth century the neighbourhood of the forest lands between East Grinstead and Horsham was considered unsafe for quiet, lawabiding persons, and many of even the lesser gentry went to live in the towns. There were no hard roads, and the mire of the Weald was cruel in winter. As late as the year 1811, when my father came of age, he was unable to drive to his front door at Crabbet from the London and Brighton coach road, three miles off at Crawley, except in a broad-wheeled waggon. Nevertheless, the bulk of the purely agricultural population retained their places on the land till some ninety years ago, when, at the close of the great French war, the small yeomen, who had been living beyond their normal incomes during the days of high war prices, were obliged to sell their acres; and the twenty years following the Peace of Paris saw perhaps half of these dispossessed and merged in the landless classes. We retained

still, however, a goodly number of small freeholders, descendants of the squatting miners, labourers who owned their own cottages and strips of garden ground. The lot of the peasant pure and simple has never been with us, on our poor soil, so hard a one, even in the worst of times, as in the richer counties. Where the soil is poor there was less temptation to enclose wastes, and, as Cobbett long ago pointed out, the peasant has always found elbow-room there and ways of living, by odd jobs of forestry and garden culture, denied him on the better lands. The upper Weald of Sussex enjoyed this precious gift of poverty and, almost until to-day, the large bounty for its cottagers of commons and wayside strips with freedom from many despotic regulations enforced in richer neighbourhoods. It has been reserved for our own quite recent times to see their more general exodus, under pressure, no doubt, in part of changed economical conditions affecting all rural England, but also in large measure of a new class selfishness and the operation of laws, devised for the protection of the poor but so unintelligent in their framing and so ruthlessly misapplied in other interests than theirs that they are finding it yearly less and less possible to live in their ancestral homes. How this misapplication has come about (and it is the special subject of my present pleading) I will endeavour to explain.

In old times, and down to the third decade of last century, parochial affairs in rural England were managed in each parish by its own vestry. This form of local self-government was a time-honoured one, and, whatever its defects may have been, had at least this merit, that in a purely agricultural parish the interests looked to were purely agricultural ones. When, however, the new Poor Law was introduced after the Reform Bill, a wider area of self-government was chosen. Parishes were grouped together, in districts of half a dozen or more, and the guardianship of the poor, and later other matters, were put under the control of a common board elected by the various parishes. This Board of Guardians had for its seat no longer any strictly rural centre, but a town, the principal one included in the parishes, and it is to this transference of power from village to town that may be remotely traced the evils of administration which are now affecting adversely the agricultural as contrasted with the urban population of our southern counties. For forty years, however, no great harm was done. The powers of the Guardians were small, while economically the union of the parishes proved an advantage. It was only in 1875, or rather some ten years later, when the provisions of the Public Health Act of that year were beginning to be taken advantage of by Guardians, now transformed into District Councillors, that the oppressive tendency of the change became visible. The Public Health Act of 1875 was the outcome of a philanthropic movement throughout England caused by the coincidence of a period of great economical prosperity and of certain gross abuses