ish it
could be subjoined, that he has no malicious pleasure in misleading
others. Livia is inconsolable over her pet, young Lord Cressett, whom he
yesterday induced to "try his luck"--with the result. We leave, if bills
are paid, in two days. Captain Abrane and Mr. Potts left this afternoon;
just enough to carry them home. Papa and your blissful sister out
driving. Riette within her four walls and signing herself,

'THE PRISONER OF CHILLON.'

CHAPTER XIII

AN IRRUPTION. OF MISTRESS GOSSIP IN BREACH OF THE CONVENTION

'It is a dark land,' Carinthia said, on seeing our Island's lowered
clouds in swift motion, without a break of their folds, above the sheer
white cliffs.

--She said it, we know. That poor child Carinthia Jane, when first she
beheld Old England's shores, tossing in the packet-boat on a wild Channel
sea, did say it and think it, for it is in the family that she did; and
no wonder that she should, the day being showery from the bed of the sun,
after a frosty three days, at the close of autumn. We used to have an eye
of our own for English weather before printed Meteorological Observations
and Forecasts undertook to supplant the shepherd and the poacher, and the
pilot with his worn brown leather telescope tucked beneath his arm. All
three would have told you, that the end of a three days' frost in the
late season of the year and the early, is likely to draw the warm winds
from the Atlantic over Cornish Land's End and Lizard.

Quite by chance of things, Carinthia Jane looked on the land of her
father and mother for the first time under those conditions. There can be
no harm in quoting her remark. Only--I have to say it--experience causes
apprehension, that we are again to be delayed by descriptions, and an
exposition of feelings; taken for granted,--of course, in a serious
narrative; which it really seems these moderns think designed for a
frequent arrest of the actors in the story and a searching of the
internal state of this one or that one of them: who is laid out stark
naked and probed and expounded, like as in the celebrated picture by a
great painter--and we, thirsting for events as we are, are to stop to
enjoy a lecture on Anatomy. And all the while the windows of the
lecture-room are rattling, if not the whole fabric shaking, with exterior
occurrences or impatience for them to come to pass. Every explanation is
sure to be offered by the course events may take; so do, in mercy,