hose English people," as she called them, were
never idle, and had discovered the secret of perpetual motion.

Sir Robert had the boudoir, to which he devoted exactly two hours after
breakfast. He had a geological chart of America, with what he felt to be
melancholy blanks for the chalk and oolite beds of his own country, and
appropriate fossils indicated by an index-finger in red ink. He had the
Poor-Law and electoral systems to master, as well as the prison systems of
the different States. He had to prove that the Mound-Builders and the race
that built the buried cities of Central America were one and the same. He
had innumerable questions, political, social, agricultural, pressing upon
him, from the history of spiritualism, the purity of the ballot, and the
McCormack reaper, down to certain expressions that immensely struck and
pleased him, which had to be entered in the diary as "unconscious poetry
of the Westerners,"--such phrases as "the fall" (of the leaf),
"morning-glories," "dancing like a breeze," "Daphnes" (instead of laurels),
and many more, which he hoped would be "permanently engrafted on the
mother-tongue." There were other entries to be made,--"customs of the
Westerners," their "descent," "taxation," "climate" (as affected by the
Great Lakes), "population in 1900," and so on. There were books, books,
books, to be read, referred to, ordered. There was even a little taxidermy
to be done, and the "native birds" to be first sought, then bought, then
prepared, and packed to be sent back to England. The others, if not quite
so busy, were anything but idle. Miss Noel walked her five miles a day.
She was out sketching for hours under her umbrella, no matter what the
weather was, and only said, "Thank you for your kind concern, but I am
quite equal to it," when Mrs. Ketchum, astonished to see a woman of her
own age enduring such fatigue and running such risks, undertook to
remonstrate with her. "One must get one's constitutional, you know, and
one must not mind a drop or two. There has been no really bad weather yet,
--nothing to keep one in-doors, at least." If she stayed in-doors, she and
Mrs. Sykes (when the latter was not scouring the country on foot or
horse-back) interested themselves in their plants, minerals, seeds,
drawings, the herbarium, the Wardian case, the diaries and letters and
fancy-work, the beautiful collection of sea-weed sent by Miss Marlow from
New England, and a dozen things besides. Mr. Heat