ts alternating between boy-like levity and downright despair! The
whole is such a mixture as I never saw before, and yet I can fancy it is
as much the national temperament as that of the individual."

And now Grounsell, launched upon a sea without compass or chart, hurried
off to lose himself in vague speculation about questions that have
puzzled, and are puzzling, wiser heads than his.

CHAPTER XI. A PEEP BETWEEN THE SHUTTERS AT A NEW CHARACTER.

NOT even Mademoiselle Celestine herself, nor the two London footmen now
condemned to exhibit their splendid proportions to the untutored gaze
of German rustics, could have chafed and fretted under the unhappy
detention at Baden with a greater impatience than did George Onslow,
a young Guardsman, who often fancied that London, out of season, was
a species of Palmyra; who lived but for the life that only one capital
affords; who could not credit the fact that people could ride, dress,
dine, and drive anywhere else, was lamentably "ill bestowed" among the
hills and valleys, the winding glens and dense pine forests of a little
corner of Germany.

If he liked the excitement of hard exercise, it was when the pleasure
was combined with somewhat of peril, as in a fox-hunt, or heightened by
the animation of a contest, in a rowing-match. Scenery, too, he cared
for, when it came among the incidents of a deer-stalking day in the
Highlands. Even walking, if it were a match against time, was positively
not distasteful; but to ride, walk, row, or exert himself, for the mere
exercise, was in his philosophy only a degree better than a sentence
to the treadmill, the slavery being voluntary not serving to exalt the
motive.

To a mind thus constituted, the delay at Baden was intolerable.
Lady Hester's system of small irritations and provocations rendered
domesticity and home life out of the question. She was never much given
to reading at any time, and now books were not to be had; Sydney was so
taken up with studying German, that she was quite uncompanionable. Her
father was too weak to bear much conversation; and as for Grounsell,
George always set him down for a quiz: good-hearted in his way, but a
bit of a bore, and too fond of old stories. Had he been a young lady, in
such a predicament, he would have kept a journal, a pretty martyrology
of himself and his feelings, and eked out his sorrows between Childe
Harold and Werther. Had he been an elderly one, he would have written
folios b