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Such seems to have been the feeling among the colonists in general, and a kind of revolution followed, the old directorate resigned with one prominent exception, and were replaced by others who had acquired the confidence of their fellow-colonists, hitherto untried men and women, in whose hands rests the future history of Kaweah.

whip, as well as the rattle of the wheels, is absolutely necessary to keep the team up to the collar. But the example does not show as much as that; and then the story is as yet only half told. Let us wait till the end is reached before we try to draw a moral from it.

TALL TALK.

TALL talk has many aliases. According

even

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But it is not fair to characterise the experiment, as some have done, as a "ghastly failure." As a social scheme it seems to have been a distinct success. During the four years it has been in existence no single crime or misdemeanour to your humour you may call it a lie, a has sullied the record of the colony, no misstatement, an error, an exaggeration, misrepresentation, or case of drunkenness or theft. mere fib, which, as every one knows, is the feminine for that objectionable word "lie." It is the sort of thing at which you laugh distractedly, or lift your eyebrows in righteous surprise and reproof again, according to your humour. For we are such variable creatures, so anomalous from head to foot, that what we think "perfectly delightful" or "quite too killing day, we may four-and-twenty hours later term "a patent and intolerable falsehood."

Those who have shared its life and were of a social, "clubbable" disposition, speak gratefully of the pleasant time they have spent with friendly, congenial souls; while those who have stuck to the ship, who have remained in the colony and do not mean to quit, are determined to make a success of it. Not so much on the old lines of "lumbering," though if they can get timber to "lumber" they do not mean to neglect that; but by careful and thorough cultivation of the soil they hope to succeed where more ambitious schemes have failed. Tomatoes and melons thrive wonderfully with irrigation, and other fruits in their kinds may be expected to make a good show. Alfalfa, a kind of clover, may be raised. Potatoes make a good crop; and various kinds of corn will be useful for home consumption.

At the same time a good deal of sympathy must be felt for the original leaders of the movement, who have worked hard for its success, and who now find themselves deserted by their followers, disappointed in their hopes, and convinced that they have spent their strength for naught; and it is only natural that they should cry "harrow and alack"! and complain of the quality of the forces which they have failed to lead to victory. Thus we are told that Kaweah completed its parallel with honest Gonzalo's ideal state:

No occupation; all men idle, all.

We are told that in lumbering generally, timber-felling, that is, and wood-sawing, the men of Kaweah showed themselves deficient, greatly preferring argument to work, and debate to actual log-rolling. And where the wish is father to the thought, this is held to show that associated labour of a voluntary kind is out of the question; that, in fact, the crack and smart of the

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There is unconscious as well as intentional tall talk. Who does not know the sweet specimens of the former to be found in Continental hotels, or in books written in a language with which the author is not discreetly familiar? Here is an advertisement from Italy, Englished by the hotel secretary, which is but one of many current in the peninsula :

the very most

"The Hôtel de favourite resort by English and American travellers, as during the winter present all kinds of comfort for what concerns the general heating, during the summer is just fit to afford the freshest and the most wholesome temperature on account of special position, breadth and ventilation, the largest and most monumental table d'hôte there is to be found."

There is no denying that the stature of such an advertisement is, to use an expressive American phrase, "pretty considerable." It is a hecatomb of superlatives; and yet it can hardly help defeating its own ends. Such a nice "derangement of epithets would surely excite the suspicion of even a tallow-chandler's wife, on tour with her husband for the first time after their retirement from tallow-chandlery.

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Here is another jewel of a sentence, this time from the pen of a Florida journalist, in praise of life in Palatka, a pleasant young city on the St. John's River:

"The hotels in the Gem City (a synonym for Palatka) are world-renowned. The epicure lives in Palatka, figuratively, in the land of milk and wild honey. Here the spiritual and physical man may enjoy life correlatively. Here the loftiest heroism and the birth of genial and pleasurable emotions may be enjoyed over the dinner table' ad libitum,' and the heart and soul of man be refreshed with a satiety not convenient at all times."

Is it not charming? I should think it served its purpose to perfection, and yet no one would be deceived by it. If ever a man was "refreshed with a satiety" it must have been our dear friend the journalist upon this occasion; and the operation of the satiety may be seen in his report-as fine a derangement of ideas, not epithets, as ever tickled the wicked soul of a critic. What would the immortal Dr. Blair have said to such a piece of prose?

There is also the tall talk of the man or (more often) the woman of sentiment. With what alluring touches is the description of that somewhat commonplace thing, a girl's face, compounded! The writer sees a vast deal more in the pretty face than does its owner, and more than this need not perhaps be said. If the little heroine does but shed a tear from gaping, how our friend pounces upon the exuded tear-drop to make it serve, willy nilly, as the occasion of a subtle page or two of mental analysis! Though so fair to look upon, and outwardly so happy, the damsel is gnawed by corroding sorrows, of which the cruel world wots not and in which it takes no interest. Then may follow a masterly reference to the universal law, whereby no one man or woman is essentially more or less happy than any other man or woman. The damsel's tear-drop has been found heavy enough to counterpoise her blitheness and girlish beauty.

As a matter of fact, however, we could ill dispense with much of the tall talk current in the world. Our perverted appetites crave for it. Speech and literature of Spartan conciseness would become dreadfully tame and tedious if we were condemned to suffer it for more than an hour or two. I know well that there are men who already practise this laconic mode of intercourse with their fellows. If they are asked a question which may tempt them into fluency, they answer it merely with a conscientious "yes" or Their own questions are always

no.

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serious, and they do their best so to frame them that their interlocutors may, like themselves, be spared waste of breath in the reply. I dare say it is possible for the mind to live upon monosyllables, even as the body may hold together upon a monotonous diet of milk. But surely in the end it is bound to bring on mental starvation or atrophy-a dire and fatal affliction.

Dryden, in discussing the use of obsolete words, once said that, in his opinion, they may be "laudably revived when either they are more sounding or more significant than those in practice." The use of tall talk in moderation may be excused on a parallel plea. There are times when one positively aches to get out of the radius of the actual-when the imagination is the best faculty in the service of man, We yearn to fancy at least that there are spheres of existence and possibilities out of the common round of our experience. If the bell rings when we are in this humour, and Splendide Mendax, who has been everywhere and seen nearly everything, is announced, we hail him as if he were an archangel sent to assure us we are certain of Paradise. What does it matter if Mr. Splendide Mendax's reputation for veracity is not worth a pinch of snuff? We desire to be diverted, and there is an end of it. So we offer him a cigar, fix him in the most comfortable arm-chair, and implore him to begin. He, nothing loth, opens with a stereotyped preamble:

"I was in India in '79, you know"; or, "in Pegu in the winter of '68, and a preciously odd thing happened to me. Did I ever tell you about it? No? Well, then, I will."

And he does. It is an atrocious lie from middle to end; but what of it? Were the romance writers of the pre-Cervantes period rogues and vagabonds all, meriting to be hung because they gave such very wild action to their knight-errants, their dragons, magicians, and distressed maidens? Not a bit of it. They may have turned two or three weak heads like that of our dearly-beloved Don Quixote. But they might have inoculated a whole province of Spain with utter craziness, and still the balance of their influence would have been on the laudable side. Do but think how our medieval ancestors would have thrived for moral and spiritual nutriment if they had had no "Amadis de Gaul" and its kindred volumes to recur to in their leisure hours. It was before the time of Dr. Watts; but the doctor's plaintive little

verse about "Satan," and "mischief," and idle hands," would bear strong application to their case. If you doubt it, read Froissart and Monstrelet. The chronicles of these amiable students of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries depict our forefathers in a very disagreeable way. Save for those picturesque disseminators of tall talk in love and war-the Troubadoursthere would have been not one redeeming influence to touch their rough, unruly characters.

Speaking for myself, I have much sympathy with Splendide Mendax and his methods. I know how the electric current of exaggeration takes hold of a man's tongue when he sees he has fair opportunity of making himself-though for ever so short a time-regarded of the people or his auditors as a most interesting person. And really what does it matter to you or me, or the world, or even Mendax himself, whether he killed three lions with one bullet, as he says, or, as is more probable, missed all three lions-if he ever saw them and trusted to his heels to save himself from their portentously long strides behind him?

I am not an apologist for indiscriminate lying. Heaven forbid! Indeed, if great or even small moral issues depended upon the minute veracity of one's tales of one's adventures, I would rather hold my tongue about them than attempt to square my conscience by speaking the strict truth -no more, no less. But where the matter is of no account, and the laugh is not likely to come in unless some licence is allowed, in the name of levity let man be permitted to romance a little.

According to Rogers the poet, Vernon was the person who invented the story about the lady being pulverised in India by a sunstroke. When he was dining there with a Hindoo, one of his host's wives was suddenly reduced to ashes, upon which the Hindoo rang the bell, and said to the attendant who answered it, "Bring fresh glasses, and sweep up your mistress." Now I suppose no sensible person believes in the truth of this incident in Mr. Vernon's story; but would not the world be a trifle poorer if it had never been produced by the inventor's sportive fancy?

Indeed, there would be no novels and no fictitious literature of any kind, if we were to unite to ban all those of our fellows whose tongues ran off the straight line of truth. It would be no use making

a special exception on the behalf of romance writers. The slur would strike them, and they would give up their craft for something that better befitted the instincts of the age.

Really, however, the tendency to slight ideal Truth is by no means confined to such people as Splendide Mendax and the Punch caricaturists. Take this of the Earl of Chatham's, when he rose on the eighteenth of November, 1777, to make a speech in the House of Lords: "I rise, my lords, to declare my sentiments on this most solemn and serious subject. It has imposed a load upon my mind which I fear nothing can remove; but which impels me to endeavour its alleviation by a free and unreserved communication of my sentiments."

The occasion was no common one, and yet it is quite unlikely that even so wholehearted a statesman as the Earl of Chatham would feel the burden of it for very long, much less while life lasted in him. Apart from this, is there not a fine flavour of Johnsonian stately tall talk in these prefatory words of his A volume of the Earl's letters to his nephew when a boy at school is before me at this moment; and there is the same sonorous diction here as in his speeches.

"I shall seek, then," he writes, "every occasion, my dear young friend, of being useful to you, by offering you those lights which one must have lived some years in the world to see the full force and extent of, and which the best mind and clearest understanding will suggest imperfectly in any case, and in the most difficult, delicate, and essential points perhaps not at all, till experience, that dear - bought instructor, comes to our assistance."

A hundred years ago, our boys were, no doubt, more patient with their elders than they are in these days. But it seems almost beyond the range of chance that a boy in his teens would, in any epoch, welcome a course of letters like these of the great Earl, unless, indeed, they were usually accompanied by something specious and convertible as a "solatium." The above is a longish sentence for one adult to write to another adult; but unless he was a very good boy, I should not hope that any nephew of mine would be able to hold on to the end of it without losing his bearings.

Of all merry tall talk, perhaps some of the tallest is to be heard in the various little hostelries throughout the land,

wherein anglers love to foregather, from early spring until the leaves begin to change their colour.

Their surroundings favour the habit in them. In glass cases on the four walls of the room you see big swollen fish of a size large enough, one would suppose, to occasion a sort of tidal wave in any stream into which their bodies might be recast. Of course nothing is less likely to happen than their return to the element whence they were taken. There they stand amid a tinfoil setting of weeds and rushes-an unfailing and brisk source of inspiration to the anglers themselves. In life, they were not so very much out of the common; but after death the innkeeper and two or three more have stuffed their luckless skins with sawdust till they are ready to burst from discomfort. What more easy than then to label them: "Seventeen pound trout caught on May Day, 1868;" or, "Pike, thirty-one pounds six ounces, taken by Mr. John Smith, in the Mill-Pool, Fishall, with a live minnow, after three-quarters of an hour's play." The mill-pool is within a mile of the inn. It is free to the clients of the host of the inn. If the corpse in the case do not serve as a stimulant to the novice it will, at least, in the time of his maturity, act as a precedent to excuse him for his swollen yarns after a day on the banks.

It is thus, over tobacco and whisky, that the great legendary pikes, weighing between one and two hundredweight, are created. Mr. Greenheart, a selfish middle-aged bachelor, whose life is an untiring hunt after pleasure, opens the ball with a brief but bright little story of fifteen trout which he caught in a Sutherlandshire loch with eight syllables to the name. He took them all in an hour, and they scaled exactly a hundredweight the fifteen. One hair out of his beard added to the fifteen fish, and the balance would have been altogether disturbed.

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After that, we have the retired naval surgeon's story of the sea-serpent, which, once upon a time," when he was serving on Her Majesty's frigate "Humdrum," followed the vessel for a whole week. This was much; but the real wonder lies in the further fact that periodically it lifted its head out of the water and opened a mouth into which a coach-and-four might have driven, without inconvenience to the high hat of the driver. Its tail was just visible through a telescope all the while, on the horizon line. That would make it

something more than twenty miles long— allowing for fogs. The retired naval surgeon has not the least doubt about the veracity of Pontoppidan on the same subject. But since Pontoppidan's time the sea-serpents have grown a good deal. It is only natural, since, with all our progress, we have never been able to catch a single one of them.

Some of the stories of the voracity of pike are also exacting. Take that, for example, of the fish weighing twentyeight pounds, which, in 1765, was sold to a gentleman of Littleport for a guinea. The cook-maid, when she came to gut the fish, found "a watch with a black ribbon and two steel seals annexed," in the stomach. These proved, upon enquiry, to belong to a man who had been drowned six weeks previously, and whose body had, of course, been missing ever since.

Then, again, there is the Lilleshall pike, which weighed one hundred and seventy pounds, and was dragged from its bed in a drained pool by a number of men all pulling at the rope in opposition to the fish.

For real, unblushing mendacity it would seem difficult to beat the accomplished angler. And yet, who accounts it a sin in him? No one is deceived, except, perhaps, himself. So he tells the same yarnsgrown bigger every year-wherever he goes; and the echo of them is passed on among the Sutherlandshire coaches and the Irish loughs, until at length it doubles back to its birthplace in some placid English county, by a clear trout-stream in a meadow yellow with cowslips, and then the very progenitor of its origin refuses to believe in it and laughs it to scorn.

A word in conclusion about culpable tall talk, a very different thing to the kinds of exaggeration already hinted at.

When among my more legitimate letters I see two or three neatly-folded papers, with the Post Office machine-stamp upon them, and a printed head-line above the stamp, I realise that here I am nearly sure to find myself face to face with some of the least excusable species of tall talk, exaggeration, misstatements, or downright lying.

It would not matter if the papers were sent round for the entertainment of the public merely. Then one could read them with just the same interest, though less in degree, that an American humorist of talent excites. But they are venomous snares for the innocent, the imaginative,

and the unwary; and the confiding recipient of the prospectus, in which he is promised at least forty per cent. interest per annum upon his investment in the company, may be warned away from the promoters as surely as if they were ticketed recruiting sergeants for destruction.

himself might be distasteful, yet he had almost a craving to perform it.

"Well, I suppose it was a sort of a promise," he said to himself, about ten days later, by way of justification for what he felt was weakness of mind; "and I suppose she was trying to remind me of it when she said so distinctly last night, in my hearing, that she should be at the studio this afternoon. I may as well go and get the business over and off my mind."

Our sisters, too, sin by the want of discrimination with which they exaggerate. If they would but enlarge upon the real only where no harm can come of it, then there would be no quarrel to fasten upon them in this matter. That, however, is Yes, said Monsieur Fusain's servant, where they seem to lack discernment. The Miss Methuen was in the studio; would wife who flies to her mother because her Monsieur le Marquis give himself the husband has said a hasty word, and who trouble to enter? Which he did, to find straightway charges him to the old lady Miss Methuen standing, palette and with brutality and gross misusage, may brushes in hand, in front of an easel, busy there and then usher in a course of suffer-"laying in" the first sketch of a roguishing which would not else have come upon her. The unmarried lady who, having obtained, at much cost, a morsel of gossip, neither profitable nor injurious to any one in its original form, puts layer upon layer of fiction over the germ to make it the more acceptable to her friends, is guilty of a crime from which our acquaintance, the retired naval surgeon, would shrink with well-bred, honourable disgust.

It is an awful thing to say, yet there is good warranty for it: these slayers of reputation are often as much guilty of homicide as the burglar who shoots a householder for coming between him and his burglarious designs.

MISS METHUEN'S MASTERPIECE.

IN TWO PARTS. PART II.

DE LASTRIN had barely left the studio before he deeply regretted the promise he had made to his cousin.

"I wish I had not gone there," he thought; "but as I did go, I wish I had been a little wiser than to interfere with her good opinion of herself. Certainly, it is a sore pity to see talent and energy such as hers running to waste, for Fusain is quite right-she has the makings of an artist-but she evidently doesn't want my advice, and why should I burden myself with a distasteful task? I think I had better let the matter rest where it is," and Da Lastrin slashed viciously at the fallen leaves under the trees as he walked along the boulevards. But somehow or another he could not persuade himself to let the matter rest. The task he had imposed on

faced Italian boy, who was her model on this occasion. She looked round with an air of indifference.

"I had given up expecting your promised visit," she said.

"It is possible," returned De Lastrin coolly, "for I have certainly been a long time collecting the courage necessary to the occasion."

"Do you intend, then," asked the girl in a bantering tone, "to make the occasion very formidable?"

"It is always formidable," he rejoined gravely, "to show clever people their weak points." Then he glanced at her work.

You said I was too vague in my remarks the other day," he continued, "so perhaps I had better begin by being very explicit." "Certainly," rejoined Miss Methuen.

"Well, then," he began, "the first observation I will make is that you have made a totally false start there, and that nothing satisfactory will come of it. Then I will beg you to take a fresh canvas and set to work all over again.'

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