CHAPTER X.
"Collecting toys,
As children gather pebbles by the deep."
Milton.
"Well," said Mr. Brown, with that ironical pleasantry common to intense despair, "that is what I call pleasant."
The Disowned.
There needed very little diplomacy to persuade Lady Alicia to exchange the study of natural history in Kensington Gardens for its pursuit in Howell and James's, where bracelets made of beetles, and brooches of butterflies, are as good as a course of entomology. A gay drive soon brought them to that emporium of china and chronometers—small, as if meant to chime to fairy revels—of embossed vases, enamelled like the girdle of Iris, and in which every glass drawer is a shrine
"Where the genii have hid
The jewelled cup of their king Jamshid."
Truly, the black sea of Piccadilly, in spite of mud and Macadam, is, from four to five o'clock
