"Then you mean me to understand that you
and Janet have never spoken on the subject?"

"I do," said Sir Archie. "She seems to
avoid it, and so do I. Indeed, I hardly know
what we could say if we tried."

"That may change, if you are wise and kind,
Archie; but it would be terrible for you to marry
while things are thus."

"I do not believe we shall ever marry," said
Sir Archie. "In the meantime, I leave the
chances of my release in the hands of time and
a capricious lady, and have many other matters
to think of."

"Yes," said the mother, thoughtfully. "And
I had almost forgotten," she added, after a
pause, "that I too have another matter to think
of, and speak of. That poor child whom you
sent here this morning."

"Well," said Sir Archie, with interest, "what
of her?"

"I have written to her friends," said the
mother. "Though, indeed, I question if they
be much her friends either, so reluctant does she
seem to return to them. And, Archie, is it not
strange——?"

"Well, Mary, what is strange?"

"How oddly people turn up again in the
world. Do you remember the name of Judith
Blake, the heroine of so many of our old nurse's
strange stories? Judith Blake, who became
afterwards Lady Humphrey?"

"I remember."

"This girl in some way belongs to a Lady
Humphrey, whom I believe to be that identical
Judith Blake. It is to her I have written—to
Hampton Court, where she lives. And this
girl does not love her, no more than did the
people of Glenluce, long ago."

LEAVES FROM THE MAHOGANY TREE.

A DISH OF FRUIT.

AFTER the refined and complicated luxury of
a good recherché dinner, we seem to go back,
when the fruit comes on table, to the
primitive simplicity of the earliest ages. We
consume our entremets and our fricassees, our
soups and our made dishes, and then our host,
as if the répertoire of delicacies had been
exhausted, steps out into his orchard and his
garden, and brings us in a simple handful of fruit;
a bunch of golden grapes, some apples painted
red and yellow by the soft pencil of the
summer sunbeam, a dusty velvet peach, or
some honey-fleshed apricots. He is doing
what King Alcinous may have done to Ulysses
and the storm-beaten Greeks; it is patriarchal,
it smacks of the golden age and the old
mythologic times; yet it is a custom that does not
wither, and will never grow unfashionable.
How things alter! The salad, once all that
the hermit had to live upon, has become a relish
for the gourmand; cheese, once the shepherd's
only food, is now an entremet after many
courses; fruit, once the only food of the early
denizens of a world, is now the mere crowning
pleasure of a dinner.

Fruit requires no human cooking; the great
stationary fire has cooked it to a turn. It
has been basted with dews; the soft balmy
summer rain has been its sauce. Its flavour
has been mixed by the ministering spirits of
garden and orchard; its colour and shape are
of a lasting fashion; it contains essences
never discovered, and wines as yet undreamed
of; it is older than the cutlet, and anterior to
the fricandeau; its seed blew to us from Eden,
or it fell to us from the amaranthine gardens.
Turtle soup is sublime, and there are ragôuts
which exercise a moral and psychological
influence over the world; but they are earthy,
their component parts are known; there is not
the mystery about them that appertains to fruit.

The finest orchard in the world is Covent
Garden Market. A gorgeous sight in the season,
it conveys a vast sense of the greatness of
England and the distance her far-grasping arms can
reach. Those leather-coated chesnuts are from
the mountainous woods of Spain; those grey
flattened figs are from the hills behind Smyrna;
those orange golden pines with the bristly
plumes, grew at the foot of the Blue Mountains;
those pale green fleshy grapes came from
Portugal; those scorched looking bananas from
the Bermudas; those enormous pears, like
pantomime pears (only fifteen guineas the dozen!) are
from Provence; those nuts from the Kentish
copses, jostle their browner and oilier brethren
from Barcelona, and the sunny shores of
Spain. Pomona and Vertumnus (now in the
fruit business, and talking with a strong Hebraic
accent), have summoned them from every
quarter of the globe. Look at Pomona, she is
trying to induce a young guardsman to give
two guineas for a ball-room bouquet for a
lady, while Vertumnus, refreshed with a light
luncheon of fried fish, is arranging some
filberts in a heap, to give a beauty and
tenderness by contrast to a basket of peaches
next them. Artful Shadrach Vertumnus. One
ought to be charged for walking down that
central avenue; the flowers are so beautiful,
the smell of the fruit is so delicious. As a
boy, we sometimes thought of living for a
day on fruit, and spending the whole twelve
waking hours here under cover. A water melon
for breakfast, with some dates to wind up;
plums, apples, and nuts for dinner; a tea of
bananas and filberts; a supper of grapes and
Normandy pippins.

But really to enjoy fruit, one should pick
one's own and eat it in appropriate scenery
under the tree from which it is gathered, or
beside the bush whereon it has grown. The
pear reached down from the pliant bough,
where it has long swung like a golden weight
for Mammon's scales, tastes as much better
than the same fruit coldly cut by a silver
knife, at a formal dessert, as a damson does,
than its humble rustic cousin, the sloe; the
strawberry has its finest fragrance only when
discovered under its own triple leaves. When
is the raspberry so delicious as when plucked
from the straggling canes? The apple should