y matted and joined together, that the
separate roots, in spite of their individual peculiarities, appeared only
like divisions of a continuous body; they presented the appearance in
several places of jagged pieces of splintered rock, with their huge teeth
pointing downward into the water. Their decay is so slow that the
protection they afford the soft spongy banks against the action of the
water, is likely to be prolonged until the gathering and deposit of
successive layers of alluvium will remove them from the margin of which
they are now most useful supports. On my return home, I was met by a child
(as she seemed to me) carrying a baby, in whose behalf she begged me for
some clothes. On making some enquiry, I was amazed to find that the child
was her own: she said she was married and fourteen years old, she looked
much younger even than that, poor creature. Her mother, who came up while
I was talking to her, said she did not herself know the girl's age;--how
horridly brutish it all did seem, to be sure.

The spring is already here with her hands full of flowers. I do not know
who planted some straggling pyrus japonica near the house, but it is
blessing my eyes with a hundred little flame-like buds, which will
presently burst into a blaze; there are clumps of narcissus roots sending
up sheaves of ivory blossoms, and I actually found a monthly rose in bloom
on the sunny side of one of the dykes; what a delight they are in the
slovenly desolation of this abode of mine! what a garden one might have on
the banks of these dykes, with the least amount of trouble and care!

In the afternoon I rowed over to Darien, and there procuring the most
miserable vehicle calling itself a carriage that I had ever seen (the
dirtiest and shabbiest London hackney-coach were a chariot of splendour
and ease to it), we drove some distance into the sandy wilderness that
surrounds the little town, to pay a visit to some of the resident gentry
who had called upon us. The road was a deep wearisome sandy track,
stretching wearisomely into the wearisome pine forest--a species of
wilderness more oppressive a thousand times to the senses and imagination
than any extent of monotonous prairie, barren steppe, or boundless desert
can be; for the horizon there at least invites and detains the eye,
suggesting beyond its limit possible change; the lights and shadows and
enchanting colours of the sky afford some variety in their movement and
change, and the