" Good-night, Veronica. You are in one
of your perverse moods to-night. There is
no use in arguing with you."

"Not a bit of use!"

"But you are wiser than your words.
You know better."

"That's the worst of it! I wish I didn't
know better. The fools are never troubled
by knowing better. I know the better
and want the worse. There now, you are
frozen into an ice-maiden, again!"

Maud remained pale and silent, gazing
straight before her.

Veronica waited a minute, lingering near
the door, and then with a little defiant toss
of the head, shrugged her shoulders and
left the room, without another word.

The house was still; the vibrations of
the last stroke of eleven, boomed out by the
deep-voiced bell of St. Gildas, were dying
away; the glow of the fire had died down
to a faint red glimmer, when a white figure
glided noiselessly to Maud's bedside.

"Maudie! Maudie! Are you asleep?"

"Veronica! What is it? What is the
matter?"

"Nothing. Kiss me, Maud. I cannot
sleep until you have done so."

Maud raised her head from the pillow
and kissed the other girl's cheek.

"Good- night, dear Veronica," she
whispered.

"God bless you, Maudie!"

A SUCCESS ON THE STAGE.

TWO-AND-TWENTY years have passed since
the present writer, then for the first time making
the acquaintance of celebrated places and
people in London, had pointed out to him a
tall wiry old man with bleared eyes, a grizzled
moustache, and a general appearance of having
often heard (as at the moment he was hearing),
the chimes at midnight. A noticeable
man, too, with his broad shoulders and sinewy
hands showing the remains of great power, and
with his tightly-fitting trousers—which in
those days when men wore flowing garments
looked even more peculiar than they would
in these times—his enormous drab great-
coat, and his low-crowned hat. This was Sir
Whinny Trotman, whose claim to celebrity
was, that he was the last of that famous band
of amateur coachmen, who used to drive the
stage-coaches in various parts of England: he
being the identical person who would have a
silver sandwich-box handed round among his
passengers, and who, at the end of the journey,
would come up and touch his hat to them for
half-crowns. He was the last of them, and
even he had retired from the box, for the
coaching-days had retired from him. On the
Brighton road there still ran one coach, " The
Age," but it went a round-about way by
Leatherhead and Horsham, carried very few
"through" passengers, and for its existence
depended mostly on parcels. "Gentleman
Brackenbury" too, one of the best whips and
pleasantest fellows among professional coachmen,
was reported to be driving a good team
between Dorking station and Guildford town;
but save in remote districts those were the
only coaches extant. A box-coat of portentous
size, with huge pockets and buttons as large
as cheese-plates, made of mother-of-pearl and
ornamented with cleverly executed pictures of
stage-coaches, which stood in the windows of
a tailor's shop in the Quadrant, and the
spirited sketches of coaching incidents
published by Messrs. Fores, were all that
remained to show to the living generation the
glories of the bygone time. The Four-in-hand
Club, at one time so fashionable, had dwindled
away to nothing. " You see occasionally in
Hyde Park, one dismal old drag with a lonely
driver," says Mr. Thackeray, writing so
recently as 1854. And again, " Where are you,
charioteers? Where are you, O rattling Quicksilver,
O swift Defiance? You are past by
racers stronger and swifter than you. Your
lamps are out, and the music of your horns has
died away."

But the whirligig of Time, which reproduces,
slightly modified, the garments, the manners
and customs, the tastes and pleasures, of our
grandsires, as novelties for our sons, has
brought coaching once more into fashion.
This was to be expected. A love for horseflesh
is inherent in all Englishmen; the
English coach-horse is a style of animal not
to be met with in any other country; and in
carriage-building and harness-making we are
immeasurably ahead of the world. No wonder,
then, that the old tastes should revive. No
wonder that in the Park this season one has
seen daily a dozen drags, each vieing with
the other in the quality of its cattle, the
taste of its appointments, the skill of its
driver. No wonder that societies of gentlemen
have started public coaches on various roads
out of London. Coaches which they horse
with their own teams, and generally drive
themselves, for they are thus enabled to have
all the pleasures of a private drag at a some-
what reduced expense, and they have a lovely
country to drive through, and a destination to
make for, instead of that never-varying circuit
of the Park, that perpetual exchange of
Bayswater for Kensington, and vice versa, which,
after a tune, must become soul-harrowing
work.

Let us attend one of these most agreeable
of "revivals," and see whether any of the
romance of the road yet survives. So fast has
the infection spread that whereas, three years
ago, we could not have found a four-horse
coach within a hundred miles of the metropolis,
we can now take our choice of three
different routes from London. We can go
into Kent, and, in contented possession of the
box-seat, enjoy simultaneously the lovely