leave without seeming to run away from 'The Channel Islands,'
though not without being compelled to carry with me the loan of "the
marked copy," which I was to find advantageous in a re-perusal of the
appendix, and was only requested to return before my departure from
Pumpiter. Looking into the volume now with some curiosity, I found it a
very ordinary combination of the commonplace and ambitious, one of those
books which one might imagine to have been written under the old Grub
Street coercion of hunger and thirst, if they were not known beforehand
to be the gratuitous productions of ladies and gentlemen whose
circumstances might be called altogether easy, but for an uneasy vanity
that happened to have been directed towards authorship. Its importance
was that of a polypus, tumour, fungus, or other erratic outgrowth,
noxious and disfiguring in its effect on the individual organism which
nourishes it. Poor Vorticella might not have been more wearisome on a
visit than the majority of her neighbours, but for this disease of
magnified self-importance belonging to small authorship. I understand
that the chronic complaint of 'The Channel Islands' never left her. As
the years went on and the publication tended to vanish in the distance
for her neighbours' memory, she was still bent on dragging it to the
foreground, and her chief interest in new acquaintances was the
possibility of lending them her book, entering into all details
concerning it, and requesting them to read her album of "critical
opinions." This really made her more tiresome than Gregarina, whose
distinction was that she had had cholera, and who did not feel herself
in her true position with strangers until they knew it.

My experience with Vorticella led me for a time into the false
supposition that this sort of fungous disfiguration, which makes Self
disagreeably larger, was most common to the female sex; but I presently
found that here too the male could assert his superiority and show a
more vigorous boredom. I have known a man with a single pamphlet
containing an assurance that somebody else was wrong, together with a
few approved quotations, produce a more powerful effect of shuddering at
his approach than ever Vorticella did with her varied octavo volume,
including notes and appendix. Males of more than one nation recur to my
memory who produced from their pocket on the slightest encouragement a
small pink or buff duodecimo pamphlet, wrapped in silver paper