live to see this Millennium, but future Fabians may. What we want is a protomartyr in the cause. Shelley promised well, but he ultimately reverted to legal wedlock. As for me, I have been deemed unworthy of the crown. I am, alas! happily married. But you, you are single; why should you not set to all your sister-slaves a high example of that martyrdom of which the glory, as well as the inconvenience, has been denied to me?"

"Ah, dear Perugino!" she cried, visibly affected for the third time to her finger-tips, "must it ever be so? Profession, as you say, divorced from practice? Must one more noble name be added to the list of those that shock the world so fearlessly with their books and live such despicably blameless lives? I myself, too, am misleading in print. You judged me by my pseudonymous publications to be single and unscrupulous. But you were wrong. I also am unequal to the weight of that crown. How can I be your martyr in the cause—I who these many years have worshipped the very dust on which my husband deigns to tread? Can you and I ever be forgiven for thus sinning against the light?"

Perugino rose to go, indignant, disillusioned. "Et tu, Pseudonymia?" he bitterly cried. (She had been at Girton and could follow the original.) "Then I give you up. You are, I grieve to think, a woman who won't do." And he made a she-note of it.

"WITH WHAT PORPOISE?"

[A porpoise has been seen gambolling in the Thames at Putney.]

Such a sea on at the North Foreland! Glad to get out of it. Nice river coming down from somewhere. Must explore it.

Near some town. No end of oysters about. Oysters say it's Whitstable. Seem dreadfully depressed. Ask them if the late cold was too much for them? No, it's not that, they say, but injurious stories have been circulated about them by medical men. Been called "typhoidal." Nobody patronises them, and they've "lost their season in town." What do they mean?

Off Southend. Friendly sole advises me not to venture further. "Tempt not the Barking Outfall," he says, and adds that the "water at London will poison me, and I shall be made into boots." London! Always wanted to see it. What's the good of being called "a kind of gregarious whale" by the dictionaries if I avoid society?

Got past Barking safely! Who is it—Browning I think—wrote a poem about "Sludge, the Medium." Must have written it near Barking. Arrived off Wanstead Flats. See a respectable man on banks being chivied by a mob. Told (by a sprat) that "it's Mr. Hills, of the Thames Ironworks, who's been helping the unemployed." Now the unemployed seem helping him! Tower Bridge rather fine.

Westminster. Big building. Curious scent in air. Told it's the Houses of Parliament, and scent is eucalyptus, "because of the influenza." Curious word—wonder what it means.

Up at Putney. See University Boat-Race, if I can stay long enough. Feel sleepy. Must be the amount of bad water I've drunk. Knock up against an ice-floe. Two men in boat try to shoot me. They seem unemployed. Do they want to make me into soup for the poor? Not if I know it. Trundle back seawards. Meet a sea-gull. Says somebody tried to hook him from embankment. Says he "doesn't like London." Rather inclined to agree with him.

Back at sea. Know now what influenza means—because I've caught it! Awful pains in my hide! Must consult a leech.

THE INTROSPECTIVE BARD.