drive a fishmonger's cart. The
second, in the middle of such nonsense, had a touch of the tragic. She
suddenly looked at me with an eager glance, and dropped my hand saying,
in what were tones of misery or a very good affectation of them, "Black
eyes!" A moment after she was at work again. It is as well to mention
that I have not black eyes.[38]

This incident, strangely blended of the pathetic and the ludicrous, set
my mind at work upon the future; but I could find little interest in the
study. Even the predictions of my sibyl failed to allure me, nor could
life's prospect charm and detain my attention like its retrospect.

Not far from Dunoon is Rosemore, a house in which I had spent a week or
so in my very distant childhood, how distant I have no idea; and one may
easily conceive how I looked forward to revisiting this place and so
renewing contact with my former self. I was under necessity to be early
up, and under necessity also, in the teeth of a bitter spring
north-easter, to clothe myself warmly on the morning of my long-promised
excursion. The day was as bright as it was cold. Vast irregular masses
of white and purple cumulus drifted rapidly over the sky. The great
hills, brown with the bloomless heather, were here and there buried in
blue shadows, and streaked here and there with sharp stripes of sun. The
new-fired larches were green in the glens; and "pale primroses" hid
themselves in mossy hollows and under hawthorn roots. All these things
were new to me; for I had noticed none of these beauties in my younger
days, neither the larch woods, nor the winding road edged in between
field and flood, nor the broad, ruffled bosom of the hill-surrounded
loch. It was, above all, the height of these hills that astonished me. I
remembered the existence of hills, certainly, but the picture in my
memory was low, featureless, and uninteresting. They seemed to have kept
pace with me in my growth, but to a gigantic scale; and the villas that
I remembered as half-way up the slope seemed to have been left behind
like myself, and now only ringed their mighty feet, white among the
newly kindled woods. As I felt myself on the road at last that I had
been dreaming for these many days before, a perfect intoxication of joy
took hold upon me; and I was so pleased at my own happiness that I could
let none past me till I had taken them into my confidence. I asked my
way from every one, and took good care to let them all know, before
t