occupied it much. I suppose the "severity" must be granted to an island
of solid granite and to the rocks and tides and sea-mists that surround
it. But in the ordinary life there in my time there was little to
"asperate" the _douceur_. Perhaps it does not require so very much to
sweeten things in general between the ages of twenty-three and
twenty-nine. But the things in general themselves were dulcet enough.
The beauty of the place--extraordinarily varied in its triangle of some
half-score miles or a little less on each side--was not then in the
least interfered with by the excessive commercial glass-housing which, I
believe, has come in since. For what my friend of many days, the late
Mr. Reynolds of Brasenose and East Ham, a constant visitor in summer,
used to call "necessary luxuries," it was still unique. When I went
there you could buy not undrinkable or poisonous Hollands at four
shillings a gallon, and brandy--not, of course, exactly cognac or _fine
champagne_, but deserving the same epithets--for six. If you were a
luxurious person, you paid half-a-crown a bottle for the genuine produce
of the Charente, little or not at all inferior to Martell or Hennessy,
and a florin for excellent Scotch or Irish whiskey.[110] Fourpence
half-penny gave you a quarter-pound slab of gold-leaf tobacco, than
which I never wish to smoke better.

But this easy supplying of the bodily needs of the "horse with wings"
and his "heavy rider" was as nothing to other things which strengthened
the wings of the spirit and lightened the weight of the burden it bore.
I have not been a great traveller outside the kingdom of England: and
you may doubtless, in the whole of Europe or of the globe, find more
magnificent things than you can possibly find in an island of the
dimensions given. But for a miniature and manageable assemblage of
amenities I do not think you can easily beat Guernsey. The town of St.
Peter Port, and its two castles, Fort George above and Castle Cornet
below, looking on the strait above mentioned, with the curiously
contrasted islets of Herm and Jethou in its midst; the wonderful coast,
first south- and then westward, set with tiny coves of perfection like
Bec-du-Nez, and larger bays, across the mouth of which, after a storm
and in calm sunny weather, you see lines of foam stretching from
headland to headland, out of the white clots of which the weakest
imagination can fancy Aphrodite rising and floating shorewards, to
vanis