is your place to go and look for your sister." "Where shall I go?" is the brother's languid query. To which his mother retorts, with some fretfulness: "How can I tell you? If I knew, I should be able to send for her myself,"—a very simple and a very sensible way of stating the case; but it sounds as if the pet dog, rather than the only daughter of the family, had been spirited suddenly away.
The most striking instance, however, of that repose of mien which stamps the caste of penny-fiction characters I found in a delightful little romance entitled "Golden Chains," where the heroine marries the villain to oblige a friend, and is rewarded for her amiability by being imprisoned in a ruined castle, situated vaguely "on a lonely hillside looking down upon the blue Mediterranean." Apparently, nothing can be easier than to dispose of superfluous wives in this particular locality of Italy, for no impertinent questions are asked; and Ernestine, proving intractable, is left by her husband, Captain Beamish, an English officer of a type not yet elucidated by Rudyard Kipling, to starve quietly in her dungeon. She is prevented from fulfilling this agreeable des-
