x PREFACE. 



ways are endless. They attract me far more with their 

 infinite diversity than the grey and gloomy haunts of the 

 cab-horse and the stock-broker. 



But my Arcady, as you will see, is none the less 

 tolerably broad and eclectic in its limits. These various 

 essays have been suggested to my pen by rambles far and 

 wide between its elastic confines. The little tractate on 

 Mud, for example, recalls to mind some pleasant weeks 

 among the Italian lakes and on the plain of Lombardy. 

 A Desert Fruit owes its origin to a morning at Luxor. 

 High Life had its key-note struct by a fortnight in the 

 Tyrol. Tropical Education is a dim reminiscence of old 

 Jamaican experiences. Our Eight-Legged Friends were 

 observed at leisure on the window-panes of our own little 

 nook at Dorking. A Hill-Top Stronghold was sketched 

 in situ at Florence by a window that looked across the 

 valley to Fiesole. Excursions into books or into the 

 remoter past have given occasion for the archaeological 

 essays relegated here to the end of the volume. 



My thanks are due to Messrs. Longmans for permission 

 to reprint from their magazine My Islands, A Hill-Top 

 Stronghold, A Desert Fruit, The Isle of Buim, Eight- 

 Legged Friends, and Tropical Education. I have also to 

 acknowledge a similar courtesy on the part of Messrs. 

 Smith & Elder with regard to Mud, The Bronze Axe> 



