FullReads

[Drawing like two very circular n’s next to each other]

and then joined together like this:

[Drawing like ///]

the way they used to scallop flannel petticoats. Gothic looks like triangles meeting together in various spots and joined with beautiful sort of ornamented knobs. I think I know Gothic when I see it. Then there is Norman, Early English, fully developed Early English, Early and Late Perpendicular, and Transition. Aunt Celia knows them all apart.

HE

SALISBURY, June 3
The Red Lion.

I went off on a long tramp this afternoon, and coming on a pretty river flowing through green meadows, with a fringe of trees on either side, I sat down to make a sketch. I heard feminine voices in the vicinity, but, as these are generally a part of the landscape in the tourist season, I paid no special notice. Suddenly a dainty patent-leather shoe floated towards me on the surface of the stream. It evidently had just dropped in, for it was right side up with care, and was disporting itself right merrily. “Did ever Jove’s tree drop such fruit?” I quoted, as I fished it out on my stick; and just then I heard a distressed voice saying, “Oh, aunt Celia, I’ve lost my smart little London shoe. I was sitting in a tree, taking a pebble out of the heel, when I saw a caterpillar, and I dropped it into the river, the shoe, you know, not the caterpillar.” Hereupon she came in sight, and I witnessed the somewhat unusual spectacle of my nut-brown mayde hopping on one foot, like a divine stork, and ever and anon emitting a feminine shriek as her off foot, clad in a delicate silk stocking, came in contact with the ground. I rose quickly, and, polishing the patent leather ostentatiously, inside and out, with my handkerchief, I offered it to her with distinguished grace. She swayed on her one foot with as much dignity as possible, and then recognizing me as the person who picked up the contents of aunt Celia’s bag, she said, dimpling in the most distracting manner (that’s another thing there ought to be a law against), “Thank you again; you seem to be a sort of knight-errant!”

“Shall I–assist you?” I asked. (I might have known that this was going too far.)

“No, thank you,” she said, with polar frigidity. “Good-afternoon.” And she hopped back to her aunt Celia without another word.

I don’t know how to approach aunt Celia. She is formidable. By a curious accident of feature, for which she is not in the least responsible, she always wears an unfortunate expression as of one perceiving some offensive odor in the immediate vicinity. This may be a mere accident of high birth. It is the kind of nose often seen in the “first families,” and her name betrays the fact that she is of good old Knickerbocker origin. We go to Wells to-morrow. At least I think we do.

SHE

GLOUCESTER, June 9
The Spread Eagle.

I met him at Wells, and again at Bath. We are always being ridiculous, and he is always rescuing us. Aunt Celia never really sees him, and thus never recognizes him when he appears again, always as the flower of chivalry and guardian of ladies in distress. I will never again travel abroad without a man, even if I have to hire one from a Feeble-Minded Asylum. We work like galley slaves, aunt Celia and I, finding out about trains and things. Neither of us can understand Bradshaw, and I can’t even grapple with the lesser intricacies of the A B C railway guide. The trains, so far as I can see, always arrive before they go out, and I can never tell whether to read up the page or down. It is certainly very queer that the stupidest man that breathes, one that barely escapes idiocy, can disentangle a railway guide, when the brightest woman fails. Even the Boots at the inn in Wells took my book, and, rubbing his frightfully dirty finger down the row of puzzling figures, found the place in a minute, and said, “There ye are, miss.” It is very humiliating. All the time I have left from the study of routes and hotels I spend on guide-books. Now I’m sure that if any one of the men I know were here, he could tell me all that is necessary as we walk along the streets. I don’t say it in a frivolous or sentimental spirit in the least, but I do affirm that there is hardly any juncture in life where one isn’t better off for having a man about. I should never dare divulge this to aunt Celia, for she doesn’t think men very nice. She excludes them from conversation as if they were indelicate subjects.