and he has more than once reproduced that Chadband and Stiggins type of character. All healthy manly English sports meet with ready sympathy from Mr. Leech. He prefers the life of physical enjoyment to that of intellectual exer- tion. The savants and blue-stockings find little favour at his hands ; the scientific man bores him ; he likes far better to be salmon-fishing with Mr. Briggs, riding across country with Tom Noddy and the Brookside harriers, or wading through the turnip-fields with Tomkins after partridges ‘on the 1st.’ And what shall we say to Mr. Leech’s ladies? As girls, they are charmingly pretty crea- tures, full-blown buxom beauties ; but how is it, Mr. Leech, that these very interesting young people grow up into such repulsively ugly middle- aged women ? Why do you so seldom represent a lady who has attained a ‘certain age’ as an object on which the eye can rest with complacency? The elderly married lady becomes coarse-featured and unwieldy, and the mature spinster, especially if she have a turn for vegetarianism or marine zoology, presents an unpleasantly angular surface, flat feet, and rigid, meagre ankles. But if Mr. Leech is rather hard on middle-aged womanhood, he has a most kindly appreciation of childhood. How well he enters into the little aspirations and
jealousies of children, their whims, their assump-
