HEY were two quite small maidies, aged respectively four and six years with some odd months

in each case. They are older now, and have probably forgotten the stranger to whom they gave their unsophisticated little hearts, who presently left their country never to return, for all this happened a long time agoI think about three years. In a way they were rivals, yet had never seen one another, perhaps never will, since they inhabit two villages more than a dozen miles apart in a wild, desolate, hilly district of west Cornwall.

Let me first speak of Millicent, the elder. I knew Millicent well, having at various times spent several weeks with her in her parents' house, and she, an only child, was naturally regarded as the most important person in it. In Cornwall it is always so. Tall for her six years, straight and slim, with no red color on her cheeks; she had brown hair and large serious grey eyes; those eyes and her general air of gravity, and her forehead, which was too broad for perfect beauty, made me a little shy of her, and we were not too intimate. And, indeed, that feeling on my part, which made me a little careful and ceremonious in our intercourse, seemed to be only what she expected of me. One day in a forgetful or expansive moment I happened to call her "Millie," which caused her to look at me in surprise. "Don't you like me to call you Millie-for short?" I questioned apologetically. "No," she returned gravely: "it is not my name-my name is Millicent." And so it had to be to the end of the chapter.

Then there was her speech-I wondered how she got it! For it was un

like that of the people she lived among of her own class. No word-clipping and slurring, no "naughty English" and sing-song intonation with her! She spoke with an almost startling distinctness, giving every syllable its proper value, and her words were as if they had been read out of a nicely written book.

Nevertheless, we got on fairly well together, meeting on most days at teatime in the kitchen, when we would have nice little talks and look at her lessons and books and pictures, sometimes unbending so far as to draw little pigs on her slate with our eyes shut, and laughing at the result just like ordinary persons.

It was during my last visit, after an absence of some months from that part of the country, that one evening on coming in I was told by her mother that Millicent had gone for the milk, and that I would have to wait for my tea till she came back. Now the farm where the milk was got was away at the other end of the village, quite half a mile, and I went to meet her, but did not see her until I had walked the whole distance, when just as I arrived she came out of the farm house burdened with a basket of things in one hand and a can of milk in the other. She graciously allowed me to relieve her of both, and taking basket and can with one hand I gave her the other, and so, hand in hand, very friendly, we set off down the long, bleak, windy road just when it was growing dark.

"I'm afraid you are rather thinly clad for this bleak December evening," I remarked. "Your little hands feel cold as ice."

She smiled sweetly and said she was not feeling cold, after which there

was a long interval of silence. From time to time we met a villager, a fisherman in his ponderous sea-boots, or a farm-laborer homeward plodding in his weary way. But though heavyfooted after his day's labor, he is never so stolid as an English ploughman is apt to be; invariably when giving us a good-night in passing the man would smile and look at Millicent very directly, with a meaning twinkle in his Cornish eye. He might have been congratulating her on having a male companion to pay her all these little attentions, and perhaps signaling the hope that something would come of it. Grave little Millicent, I was pleased to observe, took no notice of this foolishness. At length when we had walked half the distance home in perfect silence she said, impressively: "Mr. Goodenough"-Here I must make a break to explain that "Mr. Goodenough" is one of the aliases I think it prudent to use during my occasional visits to the Rocky Land of Strangers, owing to the friendly warnings (and unfriendly intimations) I am accustomed to receive describing what would happen to me should I be recognized, as-well, as the author of a book in praise of this same Rocky Land in which I have ventured to express the opinion that Cornishmen are lacking in a sense of humor.

"Mr. Goodenough," said Millicent, "I have something I want to tell you very much."

I begged her to speak, pressing her cold little hand.

She proceeded: "I shall never forget that morning when you went away the last time. You said you were going to Truro: but I'm not sure-perhaps it was to London, I only know that it was very far away, and you were going for a very long time. It was early in the morning and I was in bed. I heard you calling me to come down and say good-bye; so I jumped up and came down in my nightdress and saw you standing waiting for me at the foot of the stairs. Then, when I got down, you took me up in your arms and kissed me. I shall never forget it!"

"Why?" I said, rather lamely, just because it was necessary to say something. And after a little pause she returned, "Because I shall never forget it."

Then, as I said nothing, she resumed: "That day after school I saw Uncle Charlie and told him, and he said: 'What! you allowed that tramp to kiss you! Then I don't want to take you on my knee any more-you've lowered yourself too much.'”

"Did he dare say that?" I returned.

"Yes, that's what Uncle Charlie said -but it makes no difference. I told him you were not a tramp but Mr. Goodenough, and he said you could call yourself Mr. What-you-liked, but you were a tramp all the same, nothing but a common tramp, and that I ought to be ashamed of myself. 'You've disgraced the family,' that's what he said, but I don't care-I shall never forget it, the morning you went away and took me up in your arms and kissed me."

Here was a revelation! It saddened me, and I made no reply although I think she expected one. And so, after a minute or two of uncomfortable silence she repeated that she would never forget it. For all the time I was thinking of another and sweeter one, who was also a person of importance in her own home and village over a dozen miles away.

In thoughtful silence we finished our walk; then there were lights and tea and general conversation; and if Millicent had intended returning to the subject she found no opportunity then or afterwards.

It was better so, seeing that the other charmer possessed my whole heart.

II. MAB.

She was not intellectual: no one would have said of her, for example, that she would one day blossom into a second Emily Bronte; that to future generations her wild moorland village would be the Haworth of the West. She was perhaps something better-a child of earth and sun, exquisite, with

her hair a shining chestnut gold, her eyes like the bugloss, her whole face. like a flower, or rather like a ripe peach in bloom and color; we are apt to associate these delicious little ones with flavors as well as fragrances. But I am not going to be so foolish as to attempt to describe her.

Our first meeting was at the village spring, where the women came with pails and pitchers for water; she came, and sitting on the stone rim regarded me smiling with questioning eyes. I started a conversation, but though though smiling she was shy. Luckily, I had my luncheon, which consisted of fruit, in my satchel, and telling her about it she grew interested and confessed to me that of all good things fruit was what she loved most. I then opened my stores, and selecting the brightest yellow and richest purple fruits told her that they were for her-on one condition-that she would love me and give me a kiss. O that kiss! And what more can I find to say of it? Why, nothing, unless one of the poets, Crawshaw for preference, can tell me. "My song," I might say with that mystic, after an angel had kissed him

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community and would always be where others were, especially when any gath ering took place. Thus, long before I knew her at the age of four, she made the discovery that the village children, or most of them, passed much of their time in school, and to school she accordingly resolved to go. Her parents opposed, and talked seriously to her and used force to restrain her, but she overcame them in the end, and to the school they had to take her, where she was refused admission on account of her tender years. But she had resolved to go, and go she would; she laid siege to the schoolmistress, to the vicar, to others, and in the end, because of her importunity or sweetness, they had to admit her.

When I went, during school hours, to give a talk to the children, there I found Mab, one of the forty, sitting with her book, which told her nothing, in her little hands. She listened to the talk with an appearance of interest, although understanding nothing, her bugloss eyes on me, encouraging me with a very sweet smile, whenever I looked her way.

It was the same about attending church. Her parents went to one ser

on

swim

From that time we got mingly, and were much in company, for soon, just to be near her, I went to stay at her village. I then made the discovery that Mab, for that is what they called her, although so unlike, so much softer and sweeter than Millicent, was yet like her in being a child of character and of an indomitable will. She never cried, never argued or listened to arguments, never demonstrated after the fashion of wilful children generally, by throwing herself down screaming and kicking; she simply very gently insisted on having her own way and living her own life. In the end she always got it, and the beautiful thing was that she never wanted to be naughty or do anything really wrong! She took a quite wonderful interest in the life of the little

ing to all three, and would sit and stand and kneel, book in hand, as if taking part in it all, but always when. you looked her way, her eyes would meet yours and the sweet smile would come to her lips.

I had been told by her mother that Mab would not have dolls and toys, and this fact, recalled at an opportune moment, revealed to me her secret mind-her baby philosophy. We, the inhabitants of the village, grown-ups and children as well as the domestic animals, were her playmates and playthings, so that she was independent of sham blue-eyed babies made of wood and inanimate fluffy Teddy-bears: she was in possession of the real thing! The cottages, streets, the church and school, the fields and rocks and hills and sea and sky were all contained in her nursery or playground; and we, her fellow-beings, were all occupied

from morn to night in an endless complicated game, which varied from day to day according to the weather and time of the year, and had many beautiful surprises. She didn't understand it all, but was determined to be in it and to get all the fun she could out of it.

This mental attitude came out strikingly one day when we had a funeral -always a feast to the villagers; that is to say, an emotional feast; and on this occasion the circumstances made the ceremony a peculiarly impressive

one.

A young man, well known and generally liked, son of a small farmer, died with tragic suddenness, and the little stone farm house being situated away on the borders of the parish, the funeral procession had a considerable distance to walk to the village. To the church I went to view its approach; built on a rock, the church stands high in the center of the village, and from the broad stone steps in front one got a fine view of the inland country and of the procession like an immense black serpent winding along over green fields and stiles, now disappearing in some hollow in the ground or behind gray masses of rock, then emerging on the sight and the voices of the singers bursting out loud and clear in that still atmosphere.

When I arrived on the steps Mab was already there; the whole village would be at that spot presently, but she was first. On that morning, no sooner had she heard that the funeral was going to take place than she gave herself a holiday from school and made her docile mother dress her in her daintiest clothes. She welcomed me with a glad face and put her wee hand in mine; then the villagers-all those not in the procession-began to arrive, and very soon we were in the middle of a throng; then, as the six coffin-bearers came slowly toiling up the many steps and the singing all at once grew loud and swept like a wave of sound over us, the people were shaken with emotion, and all the faces, even of the oldest men, were wet with

tears-all except ours, Mab's and mine.

Our tearless condition-our ability to keep dry when it was raining, so to say-resulted from quite different causes. Mine just then were the eyes of a naturalist curiously observing the demeanor of the beings around me. To Mab the whole spectacle was an act, an interlude, or scene in that wonderful endless play which was a perpetual delight to witness and in which. she, too, was taking a part. And to see all her friends, her grown-up playmates, enjoying themselves in this unusual way, marching in a procession to the church, in black, singing hymns with tears in their eyes-why, this was even better than school or Sunday service, or romps in the playground, or a children's tea. Every time I looked down at my little mate she lifted a rosy face to mine with her sweetest smile and bugloss eyes aglow with ineffable happiness.

And now that we are far apart my loveliest memory of her is as she appeared then. peared then. I would not spoil that lovely image by going to look at her again. Three years! It was said of Lewis Carroll that he ceased to care anything about his little Alices when they had come to the age of ten or twelve. Eleven is my limit: they are perfect then; but in Mab's case the peculiar, exquisite charm could hardly have lasted beyond the age of six.

III. FRECKLES.

My meeting with Freckles only served to confirm me in the belief, almost amounting to a conviction, that the female of our species reaches its full mental development at an extraordinarily early age compared to that of the male. In the male the receptive. and elastic or progressive period varies greatly; but judging from the numbers of cases one meets with of men who have continued gaining in intellectual power to the end of their lives, in spite of physical decay, it is reasonable to conclude that the stationary individuals are only so because of the

condition of their lives having been inimical. In fact, stagnation strikes us as an unnatural condition of mind. The man who dies at fifty or sixty or seventy, after progressing all his life, doubtless would, if he had lived a year or a decade longer, have attained to a still greater height. "How disgusting it is," cried Ruskin when he had reached his three score years and ten, "to find that just when one is getting interested in life one has got to die!" Many can say as much: all could say it, had not the mental machinery been disorganized by some accident, or become rusted from neglect and carelessness. He who is no more in mind at sixty than at thirty is but a halfgrown man: his is a case of arrested development.

It is hardly necessary to remark here that the mere accumulation of knowledge is not the same thing as power of mind and its increase: the man who astonishes you with the amount of knowledge stored in his brain may be no greater in mind at seventy than at twenty.

Comparing the sexes again, again, we might say that the female mind reaches perfection in childhood, long before the physical change from a generalized to a specialized form; whereas the male retains a generalized form to the end of life and never ceases to advance mentally. The reason is obvious. There is no need for continued progression in women, and Nature, like the grand old economist she is, or can be when she likes, matures the mind quickly in one case and slowly in the other; so slowly that he, the young male, goes crawling on allfours as if it were a long distance after his little flying sister-slowly because he has very far to go, and must keep on for a very, very long time.

I met Freckles in one of those small ancient out of the world market towns of the West of England-Somerset, to be precise-which are just like large old villages, where the turnpike road is for half a mile or so a High Street, wide at one point, where the market is held. For a short distance there are

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shops on either side, succeeded by quiet, dignified houses set back among trees, and then again by thatched cottages. followed by fields and woods.

I had lunched at the large old inn at noon on a hot summer's day; when I sat down a black cloud was coming up, and by and by there was thunder, and when I went to the door it was raining heavily. I leaned against the frame of the door, sheltered from the wet by a small tiled portico over my head, to wait for the storm to pass before getting on my bicycle. Then the innkeeper's child, aged five, came out and placed herself against the doorframe on the other side. We regarded one another with a good deal of curiosity, for she was a queer looking little thing. Her head, big for her size and years, was as perfectly round as a Dutch cheese, and her face so thickly freckled that it was all freckles; she had confluent freckles, and as spots and blotches were of different shades, one could see that they overlapped like the scales of a fish. Her head was bound tightly round with a piece of white calico and no hair appeared under it.

the

Just to open conversation I remarked that she was a little girl rich freckles.

in

"Yes, I know," she returned, "there's no one in the town with such a freckled face."

"And that isn't all," I went on. "Why is your head in a nightcap or a white cloth as if you wanted to hide your hair? or haven't you got any?"

"I can tell you about that," she returned, not in the least resenting my personal remarks. "It is because I've had ringworm. My head was shaved, and I'm not allowed to go to school."

"Well," said I, "all these unpleasant experiences-ringworm, shaved head, freckles, and expulsion from school as an undesirable person-do not appear to have depressed you much. You appear quite happy."

She laughed good humoredly, then looked up out of her blue eyes as if asking what more I had to say.

Just then a small girl about thirteen