"Little Ethel. It's me they look at, aunty. You 're too old."
"Dear friends again. Madge (rather elderly). What do you think of my new hat, Lily?
"Lily. It's rather old-fashioned, dear, but it suits you."
This is the very meekest of funning, and feminine tartness and juvenile precocity must be at a low ebb with the Unknown Public when it can relish such shadowy thrusts, even at increasing years, which, from the days of the prophet to the days of Mr. Gladstone, have ever been esteemed a fitting subject for mirth. The distance between the penny dreadful and "Lorna Doone" is not vaster than the distance between these hopeless jests and the fine cynicism, the arrowy humor, of Du Maurier. Mrs. Pennell says very truely that Cimabue Brown and Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns would have no meaning whatever for the British workman,—would probably be as great a mystery to him as The Dook Snook and The Hon. Billy are to me. But Punch's dear little lad who, on a holiday afternoon, has caught only one fish, "and that was so young it did n't
