An audience of schoolgirls ought to be severe critics.

As a rule they're omnivorous readers of fiction.

If you turn it down I shall tear it up." "Oh, but we shan't!" "_Please_ begin!" Thus urged, Canon Clark fetched a manuscript from his study, and after passing round the plate of taffy, to "sweeten his narrative" as he put it, he sat down in his basket-chair on the veranda and began to read.
"THE LUCK OF DACREPOOL "I had known Jack Musgrave out East; we had chummed at Mandalay, messed together at Singapore, hunted big game up in Kashmir, and shot tigers in Bengal, and, when we said good-by, as he boarded the homeward-bound steamer at Madras, it was with a cordial invitation on his part that I should look him up if ever I happened to penetrate into the remote corner of Cumberland where his family acres were situated.
"For a year or two my affairs kept me in India, and nothing seemed more unlikely than that--for the present, at any rate--Jack and I should cross paths again, but by one of those strange chances which sometimes occur in this world I found myself, on the Christmas Eve of 190-, standing on the platform of Holdergate Station, having missed the connection for Scotland, and with the pleasing prospect before me of spending the night, and possibly--if trains were not available--the ensuing Christmas Day at the one very second-rate inn in the village.
"It was then that I remembered that Holdergate was the nearest station to Dacrepool Grange, and that, if Jack's memory still held good, I might find a hearty welcome and spend a pleasant evening recalling old times and discussing past shots, instead of putting up with the inferior accommodation offered by the landlady of the King's Arms.

As no one either at the station or in the village seemed willing to vouchsafe me definite information as to whether the owner of Dacrepool was at home or abroad, parrying my inquiries with such scant courtesy and in so uncouth and unintelligible a dialect as to be scarce understood, I resolved to chance it, and with some difficulty hiring a farmer's gig, I started out on a six-mile drive over the bleak moorlands, which seemed to stretch as far as the eye could reach in a dim vista of brown heath and distant snow-clad fell.

It was a dreary and unseasonable evening, with a damp mist rising from the sodden ground, and occasional falls of sleet, mingled with rain that chilled one to the bone.