able a picture of unhappy
destiny, as a fair and delicately minded English girl the wife of a
foreigner! How I wish to resolve my doubts in this case! for although I
began this memorandum fully persuaded it was Caroline Graham that I had
seen, every line I write increases my uncertainty.

CHAPTER VIII.

It was with a rare audacity that the devil pitched his tent in Baden!
Perhaps, on the whole continent, another spot could not be found so
fully combining, in a small circuit, as many charms of picturesque
scenery; and it was a bold conception to set down vice, in all its
varieties, in the very midst of--in open contrast as it were to--a scene
of peaceful loveliness and beauty.

I do confess myself one of those who like living figures in a landscape.
I like not only those groupings which artists seem to stereotype, so
nearly alike they all are, of seated foreground figures, dark-shadowed
observers of a setting sun, or coolly watering cattle beneath a gushing
fountain. I like not merely the red-kirtled peasant knee-deep in the
river, or the patient fisherman upon his rock; but I have a strong
regard--I mean here, where the scene is Nature's own, and not on
canvass--a strong regard for those flitting glimpses of the gayer world,
which, in the brightest tints that Fashion sanctions, are caught now,
in some deep dell of the Tyrol, now, on some snow-peaked eminence of a
Swiss glacier, beside the fast-rolling Danube or the sluggish Nile.

I have no sympathy for those who exclaim against the incongruity of pink
parasols and blue reticules in scenes of mild and impressive grandeur.
Methinks it bespeaks but scanty store of self-resources in those who
thus complain, not knowing any thing of the feelings that have prompted
their presence there. No one holds cheaper than I do the traveller who,
under the guidance of his John Murray, sees what is set down for him
through the eyes of the "Hand-book"--mingling up in his addled brain
crude notions of history and antiquarianism with the names of inns and
post-houses--counsels against damp sheets--cheating landlords--scraps
of geology, and a verse of "Childe Harold." This is detestable: but for
otherwise is the meeting with those whose dress and demeanour tell of
the world of fashion--the intertwined life of dissipation and excess in
solitary unfrequented places. Far from being struck by their inaptitude
and unfitness for such scenes, I willingly fall back upon the thought of
how