The Post-Girl. Edward Charles Booth

the kitchen. You go in as you go in at Stamway's: scrape your boots over a spade, knock both heels alternately against the outer wall, skate inwards over two mats, and give a twist sideways, watching the kitchen floor anxiously the while to see whether the mats have done their work or will betray you.

      The kitchen takes up the whole end of the house, facing two ways. The first window watches the lane across the red tile path and the little unclassified garden; the second comes on the broadside front of the house, facing south, where the sun is a gorgeous nuisance after mid-morning in summer, fading all the flowers on the figured print blind drawn down against his intrusion. It is one of six that look out upon the little green lawn of ragged grass, where invisible hens are desperately busy under its long blades all day long, and chase the moths with vehement beaks above the tangle at even. A rude rail fence bounds it in front, that gives way at times when you dangle both legs on it, and tints your trousers with a rich, powdery, green bloom where it darkens under the trees by the orchard corner. Beyond this, dipping below the sunk stone wall and the dry nettle-grown ditch in which the ball buries itself instinctively whenever you hit it, is the big grass field for cricket, with the wickets always standing. And beyond this, sweeping away in every direction to right and left, go the great lagoons of corn, brimming up to their green confines, and Barclay's farm shimmering on the distant cliff hill against the sky-line; and the dim Garthston windmill turning its listless sails over in dreamy soliloquy across three miles of fattening grain and green hedge and buttercupped pasture, with the cry of cattle and the chorus of birds, and the hum of wings and the fiddling of hidden grasshoppers; and the celestial sound of the sea, two fields off, lipping the lonely shore, and the basin of blue sky above, with a burning round sun for trade mark; and the stirring of lazy leaves, the cluck of poultry, the soothing grunt of distant pigs, outstretched on the pungent straw and intoxicated with content, the solaceful shutting of unseen gates, and all the thousand things and doings, and sounds and sights and scents that lie expressed in the words Cliff Wrangham and Dixon's by the sea.

      And here the Spawer came in the early days of July, big with musical enthusiasm and the themes for his second concerto.

      They made the two end windows over to him, adjoining the orchard; the best sitting-room—that is not even used by the family on Sundays—with the best bedroom above; and he was very happy indeed. The diminutive front door, all out of plumb under its three drunken panes of different colored glass, and buried a yard deep behind its porch of flowering tea, cut him off figuratively from the rest of the house; and the little staircase, starting straight upward for the square yard of bedroom landing from the sunk mat, cut him off in effect. Its tread is so steep and so unwonted that it put him in mind of augmented seconds whenever he went up or down, and the first step gives the door so little turning space that you have to mount your foot upon it and twist round, with the sneck in your stomach, to get into the Spawer's room. A little faded, old-world, out-of-the-world room, like a faint last century sigh, dear to the Spawer's heart on the first day; doubly dear on the second. The dearest little room in all the world, perhaps, before the third. Even the irresistible tide of modernity flowing into it through the Spawer's possessions settled down in clear, hushed pools, as though the turbulent current of Time had found rest here at last and was still. In its nostrils the sweetest breath of decay; the pleasant, musty incense of crumbling mortar and horse-hair, and curtains heavy in their folds with the record of departed harvests; of air kept piously secluded under lock and key, through a sacred life of Sundays, and never disturbed in its religious brooding by any thoughtless gusts of worldly wind. On its walls a choir of pink roses, seeking the ceiling in prim devotion—such a paper as you shall no longer find at any shop in these days of Lincrusta and Tynecastle and Anaglypta and Japanese leathers, though you pile gold on the counter in pyramids and exhort the covetous glint in the salesman's eye through tears.

      From the hook in the center of the ceiling hangs the big brass duplex lamp, beneath which the Spawer bends his head by the hour together, orchestrating his concerto over a busy Jacob's ladder of full score; or, in more material mood, where he draws up his chair to Mrs. Dixon's immortal productions in pastry, with the little brass bell to his right hand, that gives forth a faint, far, meadow-tinkle when he swings it. Whereupon the twins, who have been waiting for the sound of it all the time, under orders, barely a nose-width out of sight round the corner, take up its expiring message with a business-like scuffle of boots and run loudly to the kitchen in double harness, shouting as they go: "Mek 'aste wi' ye an' all. Bell 's gone."

      By the left wall, abacking the staircase, the two-headed horse-hair sofa, consecrate to Dixon, beneath the framed print of the Ponte dei Sospiri and the twin china shepherds staring hard at the mantelpiece off their Swiss brackets; where Dixon fills his pipe at night when the Spawer's work is over, and puts a cheery retainer on the conversation with his familiar:

      "Noo then ... ah 'll tell ye."

      And tells him in a confidential whisper, after a look at the door:

      "They say Lunnon 's a rum place!"

      Or, "Ah 've 'eard tell o' some queer goings on i' towns!"

      Or, "Ye 'll 'a seed a deal o' strange sights i' France, ah 's think!"

      And goes to bed slapping his knees and saying: "Well, ah don't know!" till Mrs. Dixon tells him, "Now, you 've been talking your nonsense again," knowing well the tokens.

      And for the rest, dispersed indiscriminately about the room, there are Daudet's "Jack"; Tolstoi's "Sonate à Kreutzer"; half a dozen old leather-bound volumes of Molière, opening of themselves at "Le Bourgeois," "Le Malade," or "L'Avare"; Turgenieff twice over in French yellow; Swinburne's "Songs before Sunrise"; a litter of Brahms in his granite Simrock livery; of Grieg in pale pink Peters; of red brick Chopin; of Bülow's Beethoven; of Tschaikowsky; of Rachmaninov; of Glazounow; of Balakirev—of Young Russia, in a word; of Hans Huber; of Smetana; of Dvorak; of loose MSS. and blank music paper—all strewing the chairs and sofa and table in ideal confusion, so that before the Spawer may sit down on one seat he must mortgage another. A letter-weight bust of Chopin on the round antimacassared table by the window; by its side a signed Paderewski; on the mantelpiece the genial Bohemian 'cellist, piercing the soul of the little room with his glowing eyes from under the well-known silvery nimbus, and apostrophising his "dear young friend," Maurice Ethelbert Wynne, in neatest English through copper-plate German characters; Sarasate on the sideboard by the big cupboard undermining the staircase, where the Spawer's table-bass goes off in heat apoplexy, a bottle a day.

      Elsewhere of literary features a few; of singers, of artists, of actors even. Lastly, after an octave of days, comes the piano too, and takes up the far angle by the window corner, its treble truss touching the steel fender, its bass abutting the sill.

      And the Spawer sets to work in earnest.

      Not the Spawer of hitherto. No longer the smooth-browed son of leisure, with laughter held lazily captive in the meshes of his moustache and an unencumbered eye for the clear draughts of gladness, but a purposeful demon with conspiring brows and deadly-looking hands clawing the keys with a sinuous throttle in each finger, that draw forth a pencil murderously from time to time, like a stiletto, to stab thought upon the paper with the unpleasant despatch of assassination.

      A pause for the day's dip and dinner, and on again; and a pause for a stroll and tea, and on again; and supper and a chat with Dixon, and on again. Till Dixon slaps his thigh when he comes back from anywhere and hears it all in full progression, and asks:

      "What! Is 'e still agate [on the go]?"

      Pushing his hat from his brow to reply:

      "Mah wod! It 's a caution, yon!"

      For a second octave of days.

      And then a strange happening, to check the buoyant current of the Spawer's activity.

      Very late one night the shadow of his head lingered upon the figured print blind, drawn loosely down over the wide-opened window, and the piano poured its unceasing treasury into night's immeasurable coffers. Already, in the long musical decade since Dixon's departure, he had risen to readjust the smouldering wicks, and gone back to a new lease of light at the keyboard. The light was failing for the second time as his fingers, slowing dreamily, sought the final shelter of Chopin. By many winding ways they came at