ready store of information and anecdote,--
the harmony and completeness of the man,--his consistency with his
own small ideal, and his consequent apparent superiority everywhere
and in everything to the huge awkward Titan-cub, who, though
immeasurably beyond Bracebridge in intellect and heart, was still in
a state of convulsive dyspepsia, 'swallowing formulae,' and daily
well-nigh choked; diseased throughout with that morbid self-
consciousness and lust of praise, for which God prepares, with His
elect, a bitter cure. Alas! poor Lancelot! an unlicked bear, 'with
all his sorrows before him!'--

'Come along,' quoth Bracebridge, between snatches of a tune, his
coolness maddening Lancelot. 'Old Lavington will find us dry
clothes, a bottle of port, and a brace of charming daughters, at the
Priory. In with you, little Mustang of the prairie! Neck or
nothing!'--

And in an instant the small wiry American, and the huge Horncastle-
bred hunter, were wallowing and staggering in the yeasty stream,
till they floated into a deep reach, and swam steadily down to a low
place in the bank. They crossed the stream, passed the Priory
Shrubberies, leapt the gate into the park, and then on and upward,
called by the unseen Ariel's music before them.--Up, into the hills;
past white crumbling chalk-pits, fringed with feathered juniper and
tottering ashes, their floors strewed with knolls of fallen soil and
vegetation, like wooded islets in a sea of milk.--Up, between steep
ridges of tuft crested with black fir-woods and silver beech, and
here and there a huge yew standing out alone, the advanced sentry of
the forest, with its luscious fretwork of green velvet, like a
mountain of Gothic spires and pinnacles, all glittering and steaming
as the sun drank up the dew-drops. The lark sprang upward into
song, and called merrily to the new-opened sunbeams, while the
wreaths and flakes of mist lingered reluctantly about the hollows,
and clung with dewy fingers to every knoll and belt of pine.--Up
into the labyrinthine bosom of the hills,--but who can describe
them? Is not all nature indescribable? every leaf infinite and
transcendental? How much more those mighty downs, with their
enormous sheets of spotless turf, where the dizzy eye loses all
standard of size and distance before the awful simplicity, the
delicate vastness, of those grand curves and swells, soft as the
outlines of a Greek Venus, as if the gr