of ornamental freaks of fancy, which cost a
great deal more than the public likes to pay for
such doubtful delights. It is very well and very
desirable that handsome and highly decorated
buildings should be erected in our metropolis,
but I do not like paying six shillings for a bottle
of sherry, in order that there may be caryatides
of colossal size supporting the balcony outside
my window.

I was dining, dear parent, not long ago, with
some friends, at a certain hotel in a fashionable
quarter, to which we had been attracted by the
high reputation of the cook. The bill was so
enormous in comparison with what we had had;
it was so outrageously and humorously
extravagant; that we summoned the chief, and
ventured on a gentle remonstrance. How do you
think this honest man defended himself and his
prices? He did not defend himself or his
prices at all; he merely said, with rather a
piteous shrug: "Gentlemen, you have no idea
how difficult it is to return ten per cent to the
shareholders."

On the whole, my much respected father, I
think I would not recommend you to live at
hotels, just as in other ways I have advised
you not to attempt keeping pace with those
who belong to the period, and have grown up
gradually among its institutions. It does very
well for me, and I like it; but for you it might
prove too exciting.

P. CHESTERFIELD, JUNIOR.

THE DOCTOR'S DAUGHTER.

MILES and miles away from London, and
nearly an hour's drive from the nearest railway
station, there is a village as little known as
might be expected from so remote a position. It
is a charmingly pretty village, the houses, each
with more or less of garden to it, scattered
about, not ranged into any attempt at a street.
There is a green, which is green, and not parched
and brown, and there the village boys play
cricket in the long summer evenings; and above
it is a heathery common, bounded by a fir-wood,
whose auburn trunks and boughs burn in the
sunset; while below, winding softly through flat
rich pastures, a trout-stream glides between its
fringes of sedges and bulrushes and tall water
myosotis, blue as turquoises in the sun.

Just out of the village stands the house with
which we chiefly have to do. It is inhabited by
Dr. Britton; he is an M.R.C.S., and used to
make a fight to be called Mr. Britton, his proper
title; but the village would not have it; his
profession was doctoring, and doctor he was and
doctor he should be called; and so doctor he was
called, till he had become so used to it that any
other prefix to his name would have sounded
strange and unfamiliar. He was a widower, and
had two children, a son, who had married early
and foolishly, and who had emigrated, which was
about the best thing he could do, and a daughter,
Nelly, who lived with him, and kept his house
and looked after him, from his shirt-buttons to
such of his correspondence as a woman could
attend to. For Mr. Britton was a much cleverer
medico than village doctors and general
practitioners are wont to be, and his practice was large
and widely extended, all the county families for
miles round employing his services for any but
such cases as they conceived required the
attendance of a London physician.

The house in which Mr. Britton and his
daughter lived was very unnecessarily large for
so small a family. It could not be called a good
house or a pretty house, and yet, especially for
the summer, it was much pleasanter than many
a better and handsomer one. It was old, and
the rooms were low, and those on the ground
floor had beams across the ceilings, and the
windows might have been larger with advantage,
and the doors fewer and better placed. But the
walls were thick, and there was abundance of
space, and closets and cupboards enough to stow
away all the goods and chattels of a large family.
And there was a snug little stable for the doctor's
good roadster, and a chaise-house, and cow-house,
and poultry-house, and larder and dairy, and all
that wealth of outhouses that can only be found
now appertaining to old-fashioned middle-class
tenements, and which are as unattainable to the
wretched inhabitants of the modern lath and
plaster abominations at four times the rent, as
are the quiet and repose and retirement that
belong to those old houses. But it was the
surroundings of the cottage that made its great
delight. For it stood off the road, from which
it was quite hidden, nested down into the midst
of a lovely garden, full of old-fashioned flowers
and some newer ones, roses especially, one of
which it was part of Nelly's self-imposed morning
duties to gather, all gemmed and heavy with
dew, to put in her father's button-hole before he
started on his daily rounds. He used to boast
that from May till November he never was without
one. There were little belts and screens of
Portugal laurels and yew, and sunny bits of lawn,
one of which boasted a magnificent Himalaya
pine feathering to the ground, and borders
blazing with colour and sunlight, and shady
nooks, cool and green, of rock-work clothed
with ferns and ground-ivy and periwinkle and
violets. The house itself and all its
dependencies were tapestried with Virginia creeper,
clematis, jasmin, ivy, and crimson China roses,
and against the coach-house wall, in the face of
the south-west sun, was trained a vine that in
even moderately hot summers yielded rich
clusters of yellow-tinted sweet-watered grapes
southern vineyards need not have despised. For
the place was warm and dry and sheltered, and
everything about it throve, and seemed to take
pleasure in growing and spreading, and Nelly
loved and tended them all, and they rewarded
her.

To this home Nelly had come as a little child
after her mother's death, and she remembered
no other. That was a good many years ago,
for she was now two-and-twenty, though she
hardly looked so much. For she was a little
thing, plump, with a round face, smiling dark