It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. Where is this division of labor to end? We belong to the community.

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The third day afterwards we rode the horse, without any ill effects. April 13th.--After three days' travelling we arrived at Socego, the estate of Senhor Manuel Figuireda, a relation of one of our party. The house was simple, and, though like a barn in form, was well suited to the climate. In the sitting-room gilded chairs and sofas were oddly contrasted with the whitewashed walls, thatched roof, and windows without glass.


No one thought about it; but Margaret’s tall, finely made figure, in the black silk dress which she was wearing as mourning for some distant relative of her father’s, set off the long beautiful folds of the gorgeous shawls that would have half-smothered Edith. Her aunt asked her to stand as a sort of lay figure on which to display them, as Edith was still asleep.


Are you wondering what you will have for breakfast? In the second case, I will give you some tea to compose your spirits, and do all a woman can (which is very little, by-the-bye) to hold my tongue.” or are you surprised at my careless way of talking? In the first case, I advise you, as a friend, to have nothing to do with that cold ham at your elbow, and to wait till the omelette comes in.


Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off,—that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and by some magic, wealth and standing followed, he had said to himself; I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” “No, we do not want any,” was the reply.


One day, having, as I thought, nicely calculated so that nothing should go away untasted, to my utter dismay a roast turkey and a pig appeared in all their substantial reality. This profusion of food showed itself at dinner, where, if the tables did not groan, the guests surely did; for each person is expected to eat of every dish.


She caught it in hers, kissed it, and pushed it away. The cab drove off at the same moment—I started into the road, with some vague idea of stopping it again, I hardly knew why—hesitated from dread of frightening and distressing her—called, at last, but not loudly enough to attract the driver’s attention. My hand was on the cab door.


It was, however, very difficult to examine them with care, for almost the instant motion ceased, even while crossing the field of vision, their bodies burst. Their shape is oval, and contracted in the middle by a ring of vibrating curved ciliae. Some of the water placed in a glass was of a pale reddish tint; and, examined under a microscope, was seen to swarm with minute animalcula darting about, and often exploding.


The turn of the expression, however, in her last question, or rather the one chance word, “adventure,” lightly as it fell from her lips, recalled my thoughts to my meeting with the woman in white, and urged me to discover the connection which the stranger’s own reference to Mrs. Fairlie informed me must once have existed between the nameless fugitive from the Asylum, and the former mistress of Limmeridge House.


In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad. When it stormed before my bread was baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that way.


I see by my note-book, "wonderful and beautiful, flowering parasites," invariably struck me as the most novel object in these grand scenes. Travelling onwards we passed through tracts of pasturage, much injured by the enormous conical ants' nests, which were nearly twelve feet high. They gave to the plain exactly the appearance of the mud volcanos at Jorullo, as figured by Humboldt.


The beds of lava rise in successive gently-sloping plains, towards the interior, whence the deluges of melted stone have originally proceeded. Even the form of a crater can but rarely be discovered on the summits of the many red cindery hills; yet the more recent streams can be distinguished on the coast, forming lines of cliffs of less height, but stretching out in advance of those belonging to an older series: the height of the cliffs thus affording a rude measure of the age of the streams. Within historical times, no signs of volcanic activity have, I believe, been manifested in any part of St.


I have in this edition largely condensed and corrected some parts, and have added a little to others, in order to render the volume more fitted for popular reading; but I trust that naturalists will remember, that they must refer for details to the larger publications which comprise the scientific results of the Expedition. This volume contains, in the form of a Journal, a history of our voyage, and a sketch of those observations in Natural History and Geology, which I think will possess some interest for the general reader.


Only do come in now; he will think it so strange if you don’t.” Cold meat will do capitally for a lunch, which is the light in which Mr. Lennox will most likely look upon a two o’clock dinner.” “I’ll ask him to go out sketching with me.

I know he draws, and that will take him out of your way, mamma.


Jenyns; and of the Reptiles, by Mr. Waterhouse; of the Birds, by Mr. These works, which I owe to the high talents and disinterested zeal of the above distinguished authors, could not have been undertaken, had it not been for the liberality of the Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty's Treasury, who, through the representation of the Right Honourable the Chancellor of the Exchequer, have been pleased to grant a sum of one thousand pounds towards defraying part of the expenses of publication. I have appended to the descriptions of each species an account of its habits and range.

Gould; of the Fish, by the Rev.


15' west longitude. This cluster of rocks is situated in 0 degs. 58' north latitude, and 29 degs. I observed that one which I kept in the cabin was slightly phosphorescent in the dark.

PAUL'S ROCKS.--In crossing the Atlantic we hove-to during the morning of February 16th, close to the island of St.


The pulpy matter of the internal coating suddenly grouped itself into lines, some of which assumed a form radiating from a common centre; it then continued, with an irregular and rapid movement, to contract itself, so that in the course of a second the whole was united into a perfect little sphere, which occupied the position of the septum at one end of the now quite hollow case. In some specimens, small but perfect spheres of brownish granular matter supplied the places of the septa; and I observed the curious process by which they were produced.


I will add here a few other observations connected with the discoloration of the sea from organic causes. On the coast of Chile, a few leagues north of Concepcion, the Beagle one day passed through great bands of muddy water, exactly like that of a swollen river; and again, a degree south of Valparaiso, when fifty miles from the land, the same appearance was still more extensive.


There is the church and a few houses near it on the green—cottages, rather—with roses growing all over them.” Is Helstone a village, or a town, in the first place?” I should like to have some idea of the place you will be living in, when ninety-six Harley Street will be looking dingy and dirty, and dull, and shut up. “Oh, only a hamlet; I don’t think I could call it a village at all.


Sometimes a rambler in the wood was attracted by the sound of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly over the chips which I had made. I had already bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising.


Had she been traced and captured by the men in the chaise? What had become of her now? Or was she still capable of controlling her own actions; and were we two following our widely parted roads towards one point in the mysterious future, at which we were to meet once more? Other thoughts followed, on which it was less harrowing to dwell.

Where had she stopped the cab?


When she had left the room, he began in his scrutinising way to look about him. Lennox was there. The little drawing-room was looking its best in the streaming light of the morning sun. thank you,” exclaimed Margaret; and then, half wishing to read it alone and unwatched, she made the excuse of going to tell her mother again (Sarah surely had made some mistake) that Mr.


In walking across these thick beds of mimosae, a broad track was marked by the change of shade, produced by the drooping of their sensitive petioles. If the eye was turned from the world of foliage above, to the ground beneath, it was attracted by the extreme elegance of the leaves of the ferns and mimosae. The latter, in some parts, covered the surface with a brushwood only a few inches high.


well did the tall stately girl of eighteen remember the tears shed with such wild passion of grief by the little girl of nine, as she hid her face under the bed-clothes in that first night; and how she was bidden not to cry by the nurse, because it would disturb Miss Edith; and how she had cried as bitterly, but more quietly, till her newly-seen, grand, pretty aunt had come softly upstairs with Mr.


Margaret was preparing her mother’s worsted work, and rather shrinking from the thought of the long evening, and wishing bed-time were come that she might go over the events of the day again. Hale went out to consult with Dixon about some winter clothing for the poor. Hale, at last, in a sort of sudden desperate way, that made her start.


She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead. Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted—never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it. To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model—to be charmed by the modest graces of action through which the symmetrical limbs betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost repelled by the masculine form and masculine look of the features in which the perfectly shaped figure ended—was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream. The lady’s complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache.

Her expression—bright, frank, and intelligent—appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete.


Very different to my business, which is the real true law business. “Ah, I knew how you would be amused to find us all so occupied in admiring finery. Their prices are very perfect, too. She received him with a smile which had not a tinge of shyness or self-consciousness in it.

“Well, I suppose you are all in the depth of business—ladies’ business, I mean. But really Indian shawls are very perfect things of their kind.” By-and-by he came. He liked and disliked pretty nearly the same things that she did.

The gentlemen came dropping in one by one, and the buzz and noise deepened in tone. Playing with shawls is very different work to drawing up settlements.” I think after this evening we shall feel at rest, which I am sure I have not done for many weeks; at least, that kind of rest when the hands have nothing more to do, and all the arrangements are complete for an event which must occupy one’s head and heart. “I have no doubt they are.

Margaret’s face was lightened up into an honest, open brightness. Nothing wanting.”


Because I know no one there, and no one knows Helstone, or can ever talk to me about it.” Only help me to tell your mother. “You shall be told all, Margaret. “Bread for your family!

“Because there I can earn bread for my family. I thought you and mamma had”—and then she stopped, checking her natural interest regarding their future life, as she saw the gathering gloom on her father’s brow. “To Milton-Northern,” he answered, with a dull indifference, for he had perceived that, although his daughter’s love had made her cling to him, and for a moment strive to soothe him with her love, yet the keenness of the pain was as fresh as ever in her mind. But he, with his quick intuitive sympathy, read in her face, as in a mirror, the reflections of his own moody depression, and turned it off with an effort.


One day I went to the Botanic Garden, where many plants, well known for their great utility, might be seen growing. The leaves of the camphor, pepper, cinnamon, and clove trees were delightfully aromatic; and the bread-fruit, the jaca, and the mango, vied with each other in the magnificence of their foliage. Before seeing them, I had no idea that any trees could cast so black a shade on the ground. It may be observed, that the houses within the tropics are surrounded by the most beautiful forms of vegetation, because many of them are at the same time most useful to man.

The landscape in the neighbourhood of Bahia almost takes its character from the two latter trees. Both of them bear to the evergreen vegetation of these climates the same kind of relation which laurels and hollies in England do to the lighter green of the deciduous trees.


Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet long and thirty feet broad.... I have often lodged in their wigwams, and found them as warm as the best English houses.” The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but not so good as the former.... Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians subject to the Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, “The best of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up, and made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they are green....

A comfortable house for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once made here almost entirely of such materials as Nature furnished ready to their hands.


“Now, my good dears,” began Pesca (who always said “good dears” when he meant “worthy friends”), “listen to me. Having turned the chair with its back towards us, he jumped into it on his knees, and excitedly addressed his small congregation of three from an impromptu pulpit. “Very provoking: it spoils the Set,” murmured Sarah to herself, mournfully absorbed over the ruins of the broken cup. While these words were being spoken, Pesca, happily and fussily unconscious of the irreparable wrong which the crockery had suffered at his hands, was dragging a large arm-chair to the opposite end of the room, so as to command us all three, in the character of a public speaker addressing an audience.

“The next thing he will break, mamma,” whispered Sarah, “will be the back of the best arm-chair.” The time has come—I recite my good news—I speak at last.”


In endeavouring to make him understand, I talked loud, and made signs, in doing which I passed my hand near his face. I may mention one very trifling anecdote, which at the time struck me more forcibly than any story of cruelty. Indeed, I do not believe the inhumanity of separating thirty families, who had lived together for many years, even occurred to the owner. I shall never forget my feelings of surprise, disgust, and shame, at seeing a great powerful man afraid even to ward off a blow, directed, as he thought, at his face.

He, I suppose, thought I was in a passion, and was going to strike him; for instantly, with a frightened look and half-shut eyes, he dropped his hands. It may be said there exists no limit to the blindness of interest and selfish habit. I was crossing a ferry with a negro, who was uncommonly stupid. Yet I will pledge myself, that in humanity and good feeling he was superior to the common run of men.


Owing to a quarrel and a lawsuit, the owner was on the point of taking all the women and children from the male slaves, and selling them separately at the public auction at Rio. In the evening it rained very heavily, and although the thermometer stood at 65 degs., I felt very cold. I suppose it is owing to the large surface of foliage, previously heated by the sun's rays. I observed this phenomenon on several occasions.

While staying at this estate, I was very nearly being an eye-witness to one of those atrocious acts which can only take place in a slave country. At the height of a hundred feet the hills were buried in a dense white vapour, which rose like columns of smoke from the most thickly wooded parts, and especially from the valleys. As soon as the rain ceased, it was curious to observe the extraordinary evaporation which commenced over the whole extent of the forest.


She had listened patiently, in hopes that it might be some relief to her mother to unburden herself; but now it was time to draw her back to Mr. I went into the study just now, and he had his face on the table, covering it with his hands. But I am sure, for all that, it is the damp and relaxing air.” We are dining early to-day, and having nothing but cold meat, in order that the servants may get on with their ironing; and yet, of course, we must ask him to dinner—Edith’s brother-in-law and all.

Margaret felt as if a thin cold cloud had come between her and the sun. I told him I was sure Helstone air did not agree with him any more than with me, and he suddenly lifted up his head, and begged me not to speak a word more against Helstone, he could not bear it; if there was one place he loved on earth it was Helstone. And your papa is in such low spirits this morning about something—I don’t know what.


We were bivouacking late one evening near Coquimbo, in Chile, when my servant, noticing that one of the horses was very restive, went to see what was the matter, and fancying he could distinguish something, suddenly put his hand on the beast's withers, and secured the vampire. The whole circumstance has lately been doubted in England; I was therefore fortunate in being present when one (Desmodus d'orbignyi, Wat.) The injury is generally not so much owing to the loss of blood, as to the inflammation which the pressure of the saddle afterwards produces. The Vampire bat is often the cause of much trouble, by biting the horses on their withers.

was actually caught on a horse's back. I never ceased, during the whole journey, to be surprised at the amount of labour which the horses were capable of enduring; they appeared also to recover from any injury much sooner than those of our English breed.


I think after this evening we shall feel at rest, which I am sure I have not done for many weeks; at least, that kind of rest when the hands have nothing more to do, and all the arrangements are complete for an event which must occupy one’s head and heart. The gentlemen came dropping in one by one, and the buzz and noise deepened in tone. “I am not so sure about her, but I can fancy that you will. But really Indian shawls are very perfect things of their kind.”

Nothing wanting.” Very different to my business, which is the real true law business. “I have no doubt they are. Their prices are very perfect, too.

“Ah, I knew how you would be amused to find us all so occupied in admiring finery. Playing with shawls is very different work to drawing up settlements.” I shall be glad to have time to think, and I am sure Edith will.”


Bynoe, the surgeon of the Beagle, for his very kind attention to me when I was ill at Valparaiso. I must take this opportunity of returning my sincere thanks to Mr. Porto Praya--Ribeira Grande--Atmospheric Dust with Infusoria--Habits of a Sea-slug and Cuttle-fish--St. I shall have the pleasure of acknowledging the great assistance which I have received from several other naturalists, in the course of this and my other works; but I must be here allowed to return my most sincere thanks to the Reverend Professor Henslow, who, when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, was one chief means of giving me a taste for Natural History,--who, during my absence, took charge of the collections I sent home, and by his correspondence directed my endeavours,--and who, since my return, has constantly rendered me every assistance which the kindest friend could offer.


I sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this;—who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence.

Often if an accident happens to a gentleman’s legs, they can be mended; but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.


Hale got up directly, and prepared to accompany his guest, she could only submit. She would rather have wound up the dinner in the proper way, and with all the ceremonies which had gone on so smoothly hitherto, especially as she and Dixon had got out the finger-glasses from the store-room on purpose to be as correct as became General Shaw’s widow’s sister; but as Mr. Hale: “the days of eating fruit so primitively as you describe are over with me. I must pare it and quarter it before I can enjoy it.”

He rose, as if to follow Margaret, who had disappeared through the window: he only awaited Mrs. Margaret made a plate for the pears out of a beet-root leaf, which threw up their brown gold colour admirably. Lennox looked more at her than at the pears; but her father, inclined to cull fastidiously the very zest and perfection of the hour he had stolen from his anxiety, chose daintily the ripest fruit, and sat down on the garden bench to enjoy it at his leisure. Hale’s permission.

“I shall arm myself with a knife,” said Mr.


But a far more singular fact is the power which this species possesses of making a noise. This is the only butterfly which I have ever seen, that uses its legs for running. Not being aware of this fact, the insect, more than once, as I cautiously approached with my forceps, shuffled on one side just as the instrument was on the point of closing, and thus escaped. Several times when a pair, probably male and female, were chasing each other in an irregular course, they passed within a few yards of me; and I distinctly heard a clicking noise, similar to that produced by a toothed wheel passing under a spring catch.

On these occasions its head is invariably placed downwards; and its wings are expanded in a horizontal plane, instead of being folded vertically, as is commonly the case. Although a high flier, yet it very frequently alights on the trunks of trees.


To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. Are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives? They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. What makes families run out? But why do men degenerate ever? What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations?

It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.


With a little more wit we might use these materials so as to become richer than the richest now are, and make our civilization a blessing. I speak understandingly on this subject, for I have made myself acquainted with it both theoretically and practically. Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins today, it certainly is better to accept the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and industry of mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this, boards and shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained than suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient quantities, or even well-tempered clay or flat stones.

I have been inside one or two of them, and know what they are lined with. The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.


Margaret was struck afresh by her cousin’s beauty. They had been talking about wedding dresses and wedding ceremonies; and Captain Lennox, and what he had told Edith about her future life at Corfu, where his regiment was stationed; and the difficulty of keeping a piano in good tune (a difficulty which Edith seemed to consider as one of the most formidable that could befall her in her married life), and what gowns she should want in the visits to Scotland, which would immediately succeed her marriage; but the whispered tone had latterly become more drowsy; and Margaret, after a pause of a few minutes, found, as she fancied, that in spite of the buzz in the next room, Edith had rolled herself up into a soft ball of muslin and ribbon, and silken curls, and gone off into a peaceful little after-dinner nap. They had grown up together from childhood, and all along Edith had been remarked upon by every one, except Margaret, for her prettiness; but Margaret had never thought about it until the last few days, when the prospect of soon losing her companion seemed to give force to every sweet quality and charm which Edith possessed. If Titania had ever been dressed in white muslin and blue ribbons, and had fallen asleep on a crimson damask sofa in a back drawing-room, Edith might have been taken for her.


It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it. So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! At other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch something, though I never caught much, and that, manna-wise, would dissolve again in the sun. If it had concerned either of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the Gazette with the earliest intelligence.

No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it.


At the cataracts of the great rivers Orinoco, Nile, and Congo, the syenitic rocks are coated by a black substance, appearing as if they had been polished with plumbago. The layer is of extreme thinness; and on analysis by Berzelius it was found to consist of the oxides of manganese and iron. Was this effect produced beneath the depths of a profound ocean? In the Orinoco it occurs on the rocks periodically washed by the floods, and in those parts alone where the stream is rapid; or, as the Indians say, "the rocks are black where the waters are white."

On a point not far from the city, where a rivulet entered the sea, I observed a fact connected with a subject discussed by Humboldt. or did a covering of strata formerly extend over it, which has since been removed? Can we believe that any power, acting for a time short of infinity, could have denuded the granite over so many thousand square leagues?


If any more are left there of that name, I only know I love them for Mrs. Fairlie’s sake.” He was not looking out; no one else was near the place when we passed through the gate. Her hand tightened round my arm, and she looked anxiously at the gate before us.

I am tired and frightened. The sight of the gas-lamps and houses seemed to agitate her, and to make her impatient. “Do you see any carriage I can get? “This is London,” she said.

I explained to her that we must walk a little further to get to a cab-stand, unless we were fortunate enough to meet with an empty vehicle; and then tried to resume the subject of Cumberland. She seemed about to say more; but while she was speaking, we came within view of the turnpike, at the top of the Avenue Road. I want to shut myself in and be driven away.”


So he withdrew, while the children were yet young, into his library, to spend his evenings (if he were at home), in reading the speculative and metaphysical books which were his delight. Now there were only the well-bound, little-read English Classics, which were weeded out of her father’s library to fill up the small book-shelves in the drawing-room. When Margaret had been here before, she had brought down with her a great box of books, recommended by masters or governess, and had found the summer’s day all too short to get through the reading she had to do before her return to town. Hale grew to take an increasing interest in his school and his parishioners, he found that the interruptions which arose out of these duties were regarded as hardships by his wife, not to be accepted as the natural conditions of his profession, but to be regretted and struggled against by her as they severally arose.


You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I will only hint at some of the enterprises which I have cherished. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters. In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it.


A few fireflies flitted by us; and the solitary snipe, as it rose, uttered its plaintive cry. April 9th.--We left our miserable sleeping-place before sunrise. The few stunted trees were loaded with parasitical plants, among which the beauty and delicious fragrance of some of the orchideae were most to be admired. The distant and sullen roar of the sea scarcely broke the stillness of the night.

For the few last miles the road was intricate, and it passed through a desert waste of marshes and lagoons. The number of beautiful fishing birds, such as egrets and cranes, and the succulent plants assuming most fantastical forms, gave to the scene an interest which it would not otherwise have possessed. The road passed through a narrow sandy plain, lying between the sea and the interior salt lagoons. We continued riding for some hours.

The scene by the dimmed light of the moon was most desolate.


Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a mummy. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other’s masquerade. Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We are amused at beholding the costume of Henry VIII., or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands.

It is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it, which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people. All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present men make shift to wear what they can get.


The glorious thought that I have caught my opportunity at last, and that my grateful service for my dearest friend in the world is as good as done already, flies up into my head and makes me drunk. Although I myself was gratefully sensible of the kindness of Pesca’s motives, my spirits were hardly so much elevated as they ought to have been by the prospect of future employment now placed before me. “If the familiar little man treats my mother in that way, how will he treat ME?” “I am sure we are very much obliged to Professor Pesca, for Walter’s sake,” added Sarah.

She half rose, while she spoke, as if to approach the arm-chair, in her turn; but, observing that Pesca was rapturously kissing my mother’s hands, looked serious, and resumed her seat. How I pull my young Misses and myself out of our Infernal Region again, how my other business is done afterwards, how my little bit of dinner slides itself down my throat, I know no more than a man in the moon. right-right-right-all-right!” Faces sometimes tell truth; and that was unquestionably the thought in Sarah’s mind, as she sat down again.

When the Professor had quite done with my mother’s hand, and when I had warmly thanked him for his interference on my behalf, I asked to be allowed to look at the note of terms which his respectable patron had drawn up for my inspection. She caught the little man warmly by both hands. Here the Professor waved the memorandum of terms over his head, and ended his long and voluble narrative with his shrill Italian parody on an English cheer. My mother rose the moment he had done, with flushed cheeks and brightened eyes.

“My dear, good Pesca,” she said, “I never doubted your true affection for Walter—but I am more than ever persuaded of it now!” Enough for me, that here I am, with the mighty merchant’s note in my hand, as large as life, as hot as fire, and as happy as a king!


Or was she still capable of controlling her own actions; and were we two following our widely parted roads towards one point in the mysterious future, at which we were to meet once more? Where had she stopped the cab? The delay occasioned by this accident caused me to be too late for the branch train, by which I was to have gone on immediately. In the disturbed state of my mind, it was useless to think of going to bed, when I at last got back to my chambers in Clement’s Inn.

Other thoughts followed, on which it was less harrowing to dwell. Had she been traced and captured by the men in the chaise? It was a relief when the hour came to lock my door, to bid farewell to London pursuits, London pupils, and London friends, and to be in movement again towards new interests and a new life. That was my first thought, though I shrank selfishly from confronting it.

What had become of her now? I turned sick at heart when the question occurred to me, and when I felt self-reproachfully that it was asked too late. My travelling instructions directed me to go to Carlisle, and then to diverge by a branch railway which ran in the direction of the coast. Had the forlorn creature come to any harm?

I had to wait some hours; and when a later train finally deposited me at the nearest station to Limmeridge House, it was past ten, and the night was so dark that I could hardly see my way to the pony-chaise which Mr. I sat down and tried, first to sketch, then to read—but the woman in white got between me and my pencil, between me and my book. As a misfortune to begin with, our engine broke down between Lancaster and Carlisle. Even the bustle and confusion at the railway terminus, so wearisome and bewildering at other times, roused me and did me good.

Before many hours elapsed it would be necessary to start on my journey to Cumberland.


I have borne long with self-reproach that would have roused any mind less torpid and cowardly than mine.” It is not a month since the bishop offered me another living; if I had accepted it, I should have had to make a fresh declaration of conformity to the Liturgy at my institution. He shook his head as he went on. said he, drawing her closer, “think of the early martyrs; think of the thousands who have suffered.”

But worse, far worse, will be the parting from my dear people. “I suffer for conscience’ sake, my child,” said he, with a dignity that was only tremulous from the acute sensitiveness of his character; “I must do what my conscience bids. dear, dear papa!” “I have written to the bishop—I dare say I have told you so, but I forget things just now,” said Mr.

“But, father,” said she, suddenly lifting up her flushed, tear-wet face, “the early martyrs suffered for the truth, while you—oh! Margaret, I tried to do it; I tried to content myself with simply refusing the additional preferment, and stopping quietly here,—strangling my conscience now, as I had strained it before. There is a curate appointed to read prayers—a Mr. They are but what I have tried upon myself, without avail.

He has been most kind; he has used arguments and expostulations, all in vain—in vain. I shall have to take my deed of resignation, and wait upon the bishop myself, to bid him farewell. Hale, collapsing into his depressed manner as soon as he came to talk of hard matter-of-fact details, “informing him of my intention to resign this vicarage. “Your poor mother’s fond wish, gratified at last in the mocking way in which over-fond wishes are too often fulfilled—Sodom apples as they are—has brought on this crisis, for which I ought to be, and I hope I am thankful.

God forgive me!” That will be a trial. “Margaret, dear!”


No circumstance of importance, from the beginning to the end of the disclosure, shall be related on hearsay evidence. When his experience fails, he will retire from the position of narrator; and his task will be continued, from the point at which he has left it off, by other persons who can speak to the circumstances under notice from their own knowledge, just as clearly and positively as he has spoken before them. Thus, the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness—with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect; and to trace the course of one complete series of events, by making the persons who have been most closely connected with them, at each successive stage, relate their own experience, word for word. It was the last day of July.

When the writer of these introductory lines (Walter Hartright by name) happens to be more closely connected than others with the incidents to be recorded, he will describe them in his own person. The long hot summer was drawing to a close; and we, the weary pilgrims of the London pavement, were beginning to think of the cloud-shadows on the corn-fields, and the autumn breezes on the sea-shore. During the past year I had not managed my professional resources as carefully as usual; and my extravagance now limited me to the prospect of spending the autumn economically between my mother’s cottage at Hampstead and my own chambers in town. The evening, I remember, was still and cloudy; the London air was at its heaviest; the distant hum of the street-traffic was at its faintest; the small pulse of the life within me, and the great heart of the city around me, seemed to be sinking in unison, languidly and more languidly, with the sinking sun.

Let Walter Hartright, teacher of drawing, aged twenty-eight years, be heard first. For my own poor part, the fading summer left me out of health, out of spirits, and, if the truth must be told, out of money as well.


Or was she still capable of controlling her own actions; and were we two following our widely parted roads towards one point in the mysterious future, at which we were to meet once more? As a misfortune to begin with, our engine broke down between Lancaster and Carlisle. It was a relief when the hour came to lock my door, to bid farewell to London pursuits, London pupils, and London friends, and to be in movement again towards new interests and a new life. Fairlie had ordered to be in waiting for me.

I had to wait some hours; and when a later train finally deposited me at the nearest station to Limmeridge House, it was past ten, and the night was so dark that I could hardly see my way to the pony-chaise which Mr. Where had she stopped the cab? We drove away slowly through the darkness in perfect silence. It was, by my watch, nearly an hour and a half from the time of our leaving the station before I heard the sound of the sea in the distance, and the crunch of our wheels on a smooth gravel drive.

The driver was evidently discomposed by the lateness of my arrival. My travelling instructions directed me to go to Carlisle, and then to diverge by a branch railway which ran in the direction of the coast. He was in that state of highly respectful sulkiness which is peculiar to English servants. Had the forlorn creature come to any harm?

What had become of her now? The delay occasioned by this accident caused me to be too late for the branch train, by which I was to have gone on immediately. The roads were bad, and the dense obscurity of the night increased the difficulty of getting over the ground quickly. That was my first thought, though I shrank selfishly from confronting it.

Had she been traced and captured by the men in the chaise? Even the bustle and confusion at the railway terminus, so wearisome and bewildering at other times, roused me and did me good. Other thoughts followed, on which it was less harrowing to dwell.


We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcæ, but Fashion. When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now,” not emphasizing the “They” at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence? Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on? When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the “they,”—“It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now.”


Yet had any one come with a fine house, and a fine estate, and a fine title to boot, Edith would still have clung to Captain Lennox while the temptation lasted; when it was over, it is possible she might have had little qualms of ill-concealed regret that Captain Lennox could not have united in his person everything that was desirable. Shaw had given way to the presentiment, as she expressed it; and had rather urged on the marriage, although it was below the expectations which many of Edith’s acquaintances had formed for her, a young and pretty heiress. The very parts which made Margaret glow as she listened, Edith pretended to shiver and shudder at; partly for the pleasure she had in being coaxed out of her dislike by her fond lover, and partly because anything of a gipsy or make-shift life was really distasteful to her. Shaw enjoyed the romance of the present engagement rather more than her daughter.

The course of true love in Edith’s case had run remarkably smooth. Shaw said that her only child should marry for love,—and sighed emphatically, as if love had not been her motive for marrying the General. Not but that Edith was very thoroughly and properly in love; still she would certainly have preferred a good house in Belgravia, to all the picturesqueness of the life which Captain Lennox described at Corfu. I had quite prophetic feeling when Captain Lennox”—and here the voice dropped into a whisper, but Margaret could easily supply the blank.

In this she was but her mother’s child; who, after deliberately marrying General Shaw with no warmer feeling than respect for his character and establishment, was constantly, though quietly, bemoaning her hard lot in being united to one whom she could not love. Of course, without any maternal partiality, I foresaw that the dear child was likely to marry early; indeed, I had often said that I was sure she would be married before she was nineteen.


The forest abounded with beautiful objects; among which the tree ferns, though not large, were, from their bright green foliage, and the elegant curvature of their fronds, most worthy of admiration. I suppose it is owing to the large surface of foliage, previously heated by the sun's rays. At the height of a hundred feet the hills were buried in a dense white vapour, which rose like columns of smoke from the most thickly wooded parts, and especially from the valleys. On Saturday and Sunday they work for themselves, and in this fertile climate the labour of two days is sufficient to support a man and his family for the whole week.

In the evening it rained very heavily, and although the thermometer stood at 65 degs., I felt very cold. I observed this phenomenon on several occasions. April 14th.--Leaving Socego, we rode to another estate on the Rio Macae, which was the last patch of cultivated ground in that direction. As soon as the rain ceased, it was curious to observe the extraordinary evaporation which commenced over the whole extent of the forest.

Considering the enormous area of Brazil, the proportion of cultivated ground can scarcely be considered as anything, compared to that which is left in the state of nature: at some future age, how vast a population it will support! While staying at this estate, I was very nearly being an eye-witness to one of those atrocious acts which can only take place in a slave country. The estate was two and a half miles long, and the owner had forgotten how many broad. Only a very small piece had been cleared, yet almost every acre was capable of yielding all the various rich productions of a tropical land.

During the second day's journey we found the road so shut up, that it was necessary that a man should go ahead with a sword to cut away the creepers.


One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned any thing of absolute value by living. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were.

There is no play in them, for this comes after work. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other.

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.

Yet they honestly think there is no choice left.


From breakfast to lunch, Mr. The turn of the expression, however, in her last question, or rather the one chance word, “adventure,” lightly as it fell from her lips, recalled my thoughts to my meeting with the woman in white, and urged me to discover the connection which the stranger’s own reference to Mrs. The very night before I arrived at this house, I met with an adventure; and the wonder and excitement of it, I can assure you, Miss Halcombe, will last me for the whole term of my stay in Cumberland, if not for a much longer period.” Drawing is her favourite whim, mind, not mine.

No matter—my sister likes it; so I waste paint and spoil paper, for her sake, as composedly as any woman in England. After lunch, Miss Fairlie and I shoulder our sketch-books, and go out to misrepresent Nature, under your directions. Can you reconcile yourself to our quiet, regular life? Fairlie’s drawings will occupy you.

“Even if I were the most restless of mankind,” I said, “I should be in no danger of thirsting after adventures for some time to come. Miss Fairlie plays delightfully. As for the evenings, I think we can help you through them. What do you think of the programme?

For my own poor part, I don’t know one note of music from the other; but I can match you at chess, backgammon, ecarte, and (with the inevitable female drawbacks) even at billiards as well. She had run on thus far, in her gracefully bantering way, with no other interruptions on my part than the unimportant replies which politeness required of me. or do you mean to be restless, and secretly thirst for change and adventure, in the humdrum atmosphere of Limmeridge House?” Women can’t draw—their minds are too flighty, and their eyes are too inattentive.

Fairlie informed me must once have existed between the nameless fugitive from the Asylum, and the former mistress of Limmeridge House.


To know this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which every where border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable, wood pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked. Perhaps it will be found, that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below him. The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the modern house with all its improvements.

The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam. While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and “silent poor.” I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich.

It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. And if the civilized man’s pursuits are no worthier than the savage’s, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former? It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

But how do the poor minority fare?


Edith played brilliantly. Captain Lennox had come earlier than was expected; or was it really so late? She really did persuade herself that she was submitting to some hard external necessity; and thus she was able to moan and complain in her soft manner, all the time she was in reality doing just what she liked. Now that, the General being gone, she had every good of life, with as few drawbacks as possible, she had been rather perplexed to find an anxiety, if not a sorrow.

Shaw had as strong wishes as most people, but she never liked to do anything from the open and acknowledged motive of her own good will and pleasure; she preferred being compelled to gratify herself by some other person’s command or desire. Then Edith came back, glowing with pleasure, half-shyly, half-proudly leading in her tall handsome Captain. They looked at their watches, were duly shocked, and took their leave. Edith is sitting down to play, and I just know enough of music to turn over the leaves for her; and, besides, Aunt Shaw won’t like us to talk.”

In the middle of the piece the door half-opened, and Edith saw Captain Lennox hesitating whether to come in. Now I must go. She had, however, of late settled upon her own health as a source of apprehension; she had a nervous little cough whenever she thought about it; and some complaisant doctor ordered her just what she desired—a winter in Italy. She threw down her music, and rushed out of the room, leaving Margaret standing confused and blushing to explain to the astonished guests what vision had shown itself to cause Edith’s sudden flight.

Shaw welcomed him in her gentle kindly way, which had always something plaintive in it, arising from the long habit of considering herself a victim to an uncongenial marriage. His brother shook hands with him, and Mrs.


I am tired and frightened. Her hand tightened round my arm, and she looked anxiously at the gate before us. she asked, looking up and down the road affrightedly, the instant I stopped. I explained to her that we must walk a little further to get to a cab-stand, unless we were fortunate enough to meet with an empty vehicle; and then tried to resume the subject of Cumberland.

We had hardly proceeded a third of the way down the Avenue Road when I saw a cab draw up at a house a few doors below us, on the opposite side of the way. “Did you hear anybody calling after us?” “This is London,” she said. In the excited state of my curiosity, at that moment, the chance reference to Mr.

Fairlie’s place of residence, on the lips of my strange companion, staggered me with astonishment. She seemed about to say more; but while she was speaking, we came within view of the turnpike, at the top of the Avenue Road. I can’t say who lives at Limmeridge now. If any more are left there of that name, I only know I love them for Mrs.

It’s Limmeridge village, and Limmeridge House, I should like to see again.” The sight of the gas-lamps and houses seemed to agitate her, and to make her impatient. Fairlie’s sake.” I want to shut myself in and be driven away.”

“Do you see any carriage I can get? He was not looking out; no one else was near the place when we passed through the gate. It was useless. She could think and talk of nothing else.

Fairlie is dead; and her husband is dead; and their little girl may be married and gone away by this time. That idea of shutting herself in, and being driven away, had now got full possession of her mind. I was only struck by the name of Limmeridge House. not my people.

It was my turn now to stop suddenly. I heard it mentioned by some Cumberland people a few days since.”


Not content with paying the nation in general the compliment of invariably carrying an umbrella, and invariably wearing gaiters and a white hat, the Professor further aspired to become an Englishman in his habits and amusements, as well as in his personal appearance. Remarkable anywhere, by his personal appearance, he was still further distinguished among the rank and file of mankind by the harmless eccentricity of his character. Without being actually a dwarf—for he was perfectly well proportioned from head to foot—Pesca was, I think, the smallest human being I ever saw out of a show-room. We had met there accidentally, and were bathing together.

All I then knew of the history of his life was, that he had once held a situation in the University of Padua; that he had left Italy for political reasons (the nature of which he uniformly declined to mention to any one); and that he had been for many years respectably established in London as a teacher of languages. Finding us distinguished, as a nation, by our love of athletic exercises, the little man, in the innocence of his heart, devoted himself impromptu to all our English sports and pastimes whenever he had the opportunity of joining them; firmly persuaded that he could adopt our national amusements of the field by an effort of will precisely as he had adopted our national gaiters and our national white hat. The ruling idea of his life appeared to be, that he was bound to show his gratitude to the country which had afforded him an asylum and a means of subsistence by doing his utmost to turn himself into an Englishman. If we had been engaged in any exercise peculiar to my own nation I should, of course, have looked after Pesca carefully; but as foreigners are generally quite as well able to take care of themselves in the water as Englishmen, it never occurred to me that the art of swimming might merely add one more to the list of manly exercises which the Professor believed that he could learn impromptu.

I had seen him risk his limbs blindly at a fox-hunt and in a cricket-field; and soon afterwards I saw him risk his life, just as blindly, in the sea at Brighton.


At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again. I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this book.

In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. We belong to the community. I lived there two years and two months.

"I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up." No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. and what object does it finally serve?

We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. Where is this division of labor to end? Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained.


How many a poor immortal soul have I met well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot! He has no time to be anything but a machine. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge?

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?

Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum, Et documenta damus quâ simus origine nati. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh. We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. “From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care, Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.”

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.


When I think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any car-load of fashionable furniture. Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for. At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning’s work undone.

As if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or, gradually leaving off palmleaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin, complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arab’s or the Indian’s? Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilization. I hardly need refer now to the laborers in our Southern States who produce the staple exports of this country, and are themselves a staple production of the South.

Shall the respectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man’s providing a certain number of superfluous glow-shoes, and umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies? Or what if I were to allow—would it not be a singular allowance?—that our furniture should be more complex than the Arab’s, in proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors! But to confine myself to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances. Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?


When she was with her mother, her father seemed the best person to apply to for information; and when with him, she thought that she could speak more easily to her mother. Probably there was nothing much to be heard that was new. Now there were only the well-bound, little-read English Classics, which were weeded out of her father’s library to fill up the small book-shelves in the drawing-room. The book-shelves did not afford much resource.

In one of the letters she had received before leaving Harley Street, her father had told her that they had heard from Frederick; he was still at Rio, and very well in health, and sent his best love to her; which was dry bones, but not the living intelligence she longed for. But a consciousness that her mother’s delicate health and positive dislike to Helstone, all dated from the time of the mutiny in which Frederick had been engaged—the full account of which Margaret had never heard, and which now seemed doomed to be buried in sad oblivion,—made her pause and turn away from the subject each time she approached it. Once or twice Margaret found herself mechanically counting the repetition of the monotonous sound, while she wondered if she might venture to put a question on a subject very near to her heart, and ask where Frederick was now; what he was doing; how long it was since they had heard from him. Thomson’s Season’s, Hayley’s Cowper, Middleton’s Cicero, were by far the lightest, newest, and most amusing.

Hale listened with interest, sometimes amused and questioning, at others a little inclined to compare her sister’s circumstances of ease and comfort with the narrower means at Helstone Vicarage. On such evenings Margaret was apt to stop talking rather abruptly, and listen to the drip-drip of the rain upon the leads of the little bow window. Margaret told her mother every particular of her London life, to all of which Mrs.


Paul appear from a distance of a brilliantly white colour. The rocks of St. It is a remarkable fact, that all the many small islands, lying far from any continent, in the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans, with the exception of the Seychelles and this little point of rock, are, I believe, composed either of coral or of erupted matter. The highest point is only fifty feet above the level of the sea, and the entire circumference is under three-quarters of a mile.

Below some small masses of guano at Ascension, and on the Abrolhos Islets, I found certain stalactitic branching bodies, formed apparently in the same manner as the thin white coating on these rocks. Its mineralogical constitution is not simple; in some parts the rock is of a cherty, in others of a felspathic nature, including thin veins of serpentine. It contains much animal matter, and its origin, no doubt, is due to the action of the rain or spray on the birds' dung. This, when examined with a lens, is found to consist of numerous exceedingly thin layers, its total thickness being about the tenth of an inch.

The branching bodies so closely resembled in general appearance certain nulliporae (a family of hard calcareous sea-plants), that in lately looking hastily over my collection I did not perceive the difference. The volcanic nature of these oceanic islands is evidently an extension of that law, and the effect of those same causes, whether chemical or mechanical, from which it results that a vast majority of the volcanoes now in action stand either near sea-coasts or as islands in the midst of the sea. This small point rises abruptly out of the depths of the ocean. This is partly owing to the dung of a vast multitude of seafowl, and partly to a coating of a hard glossy substance with a pearly lustre, which is intimately united to the surface of the rocks.


After starting all the petty objections that I could think of to going to Cumberland, and after hearing them answered, one after another, to my own complete discomfiture, I tried to set up a last obstacle by asking what was to become of my pupils in London while I was teaching Mr. My sister reminded me that this gentleman had expressly placed his services at my disposal, during the present season, in case I wished to leave town; my mother seriously appealed to me not to let an idle caprice stand in the way of my own interests and my own health; and Pesca piteously entreated that I would not wound him to the heart by rejecting the first grateful offer of service that he had been able to make to the friend who had saved his life. and, more than that, your bed, your breakfast, your dinner, your gorging English teas and lunches and drinks of foaming beer, all for nothing—why, Walter, my dear good friend—deuce-what-the-deuce!—for the first time in my life I have not eyes enough in my head to look, and wonder at you!” The evident sincerity and affection which inspired these remonstrances would have influenced any man with an atom of good feeling in his composition.

Fairlie’s young ladies to sketch from nature. Though I could not conquer my own unaccountable perversity, I had at least virtue enough to be heartily ashamed of it, and to end the discussion pleasantly by giving way, and promising to do all that was wanted of me. Neither my mother’s evident astonishment at my behaviour, nor Pesca’s fervid enumeration of the advantages offered to me by the new employment, had any effect in shaking my unreasonable disinclination to go to Limmeridge House. The obvious answer to this was, that the greater part of them would be away on their autumn travels, and that the few who remained at home might be confided to the care of one of my brother drawing-masters, whose pupils I had once taken off his hands under similar circumstances.


The often repeated description of the stately palm and other noble tropical plants, then birds, and lastly man, taking possession of the coral islets as soon as formed, in the Pacific, is probably not correct; I fear it destroys the poetry of this story, that feather and dirt-feeding and parasitic insects and spiders should be the first inhabitants of newly formed oceanic land. FERNANDO NORONHA, Feb. I have heard that a rock near the Bermudas, lying many miles out at sea, and at a considerable depth, was first discovered by the circumstance of fish having been observed in the neighbourhood. 20th.--As far as I was enabled to observe, during the few hours we stayed at this place, the constitution of the island is volcanic, but probably not of a recent date.

The smallest rock in the tropical seas, by giving a foundation for the growth of innumerable kinds of sea-weed and compound animals, supports likewise a large number of fish. Helena, however, I ascertained that some pinnacles, of a nearly similar figure and constitution, had been formed by the injection of melted rock into yielding strata, which thus had formed the moulds for these gigantic obelisks. The whole island is covered with wood; but from the dryness of the climate there is no appearance of luxuriance. Half-way up the mountain, some great masses of the columnar rock, shaded by laurel-like trees, and ornamented by others covered with fine pink flowers but without a single leaf, gave a pleasing effect to the nearer parts of the scenery.

The rock is phonolite, and is divided into irregular columns. The most remarkable feature is a conical hill, about one thousand feet high, the upper part of which is exceedingly steep, and on one side overhangs its base. On viewing one of these isolated masses, at first one is inclined to believe that it has been suddenly pushed up in a semi-fluid state. The sharks and the seamen in the boats maintained a constant struggle which should secure the greater share of the prey caught by the fishing-lines.


Who lives in these cottages?” She laughed and blushed: Mr. Lennox hastily introduced the two figures into his sketch, and finished up the landscape with a subordinate reference to them—as Margaret perceived, when the time came for getting up, putting away water, and scraps of paper, and exhibiting to each other their sketches. The old man stood bareheaded in the sun, leaning on his stick at the front of his cottage.

You might have come straight from chambers in the Temple, instead of having been two months in the Highlands! Margaret brought out her drawing materials for him to choose from; and after the paper and brushes had been duly selected, the two set out in the merriest spirits in the world. “Now, I call that treacherous,” said she. Look—there he is—I must go and speak to him.

But where shall we sit?” “With your feet in that puddle for a regal footstool! “Before they tumbled down and were no more seen. He is so deaf you will hear all our secrets.”

“I little thought that you were making old Isaac and me into subjects, when you told me to ask him the history of these cottages.” “Now, please, just stop here for a minute or two,” said Margaret. Lennox watched her countenance. I will put my plaid over it, and it will be a regular forest throne.”

Look at this beautiful trunk of a tree, which the woodcutters have left just in the right place for the light. Stay, I will move, and then you can come nearer this way. “They were built by squatters fifty or sixty years ago. His stiff features relaxed into a slow smile as Margaret went up and spoke to him.

One is uninhabited; the foresters are going to take it down, as soon as the other is dead, poor old fellow! Truly, if they are to be sketched—and they are very picturesque—we had better not put it off till next year. “These are the cottages that haunted me so during the rainy fortnight, reproaching me for not having sketched them.”


Daniell has observed, in his meteorological essays, that a cloud sometimes appears fixed on a mountain summit, while the wind continues to blow over it. I have seen a number of little boys practising this art as a game of play and from their skill in hitting an upright stick, they promised well for more earnest attempts. The frequent occurrence of murder may be partly attributed to this habit. My companion, the day before, had shot two large bearded monkeys.

It has been remarked, with much truth, that abruptly conical hills are characteristic of the formation which Humboldt designates as gneiss-granite. I was often interested by watching the clouds, which, rolling in from seaward, formed a bank just beneath the highest point of the Corcovado. I profited, however, by my acquaintance with the Portuguese padre, for on another occasion he gave me a fine specimen of the Yagouaroundi cat. Our day's sport, besides the monkey, was confined to sundry small green parrots and a few toucans.

Nothing can be more striking than the effect of these huge rounded masses of naked rock rising out of the most luxuriant vegetation. One of them thus remained fast to a branch, and it was necessary to cut down a large tree to procure it. This was soon effected, and down came tree and monkey with an awful crash. This mountain, like most others, when thus partly veiled, appeared to rise to a far prouder elevation than its real height of 2300 feet.

These animals have prehensile tails, the extremity of which, even after death, can support the whole weight of the body. The Brazilians are so dexterous with the knife, that they can throw it to some distance with precision, and with sufficient force to cause a fatal wound. Every one has heard of the beauty of the scenery near Botofogo. The house in which I lived was seated close beneath the well-known mountain of the Corcovado.


She turned, and pointed back to a place at the junction of the road to London and the road to Hampstead, where there was a gap in the hedge. She spoke with unnecessary earnestness and agitation, and shrank back from me several paces. She stopped in confusion; shifted her bag from one hand to the other; and sighed bitterly. “If it troubles you to explain your strange situation to me, don’t think of returning to the subject again.

Why not call to me? I have no right to ask you for any explanations. I have met with an accident—I am very unfortunate in being here alone so late. Strange, to say the least of it.

Why do you suspect me of doing wrong?” Tell me how I can help you; and if I can, I will.” The first touch of womanly tenderness that I had heard from her trembled in her voice as she said the words; but no tears glistened in those large, wistfully attentive eyes of hers, which were still fixed on me. The loneliness and helplessness of the woman touched me.

“Pray don’t suppose that I have any idea of suspecting you,” I said, “or any other wish than to be of assistance to you, if I can. “You may trust me for any harmless purpose,” I said. “You don’t think the worse of me because I have met with an accident?” I have done nothing wrong.

“May I trust you?” I only wondered at your appearance in the road, because it seemed to me to be empty the instant before I saw you.” Steal after me and touch me? I doubted and feared about it till you passed; and then I was obliged to steal after you, and touch you.”

“You are very kind, and I am very, very thankful to have met you.” The natural impulse to assist her and to spare her got the better of the judgment, the caution, the worldly tact, which an older, wiser, and colder man might have summoned to help him in this strange emergency. “I heard you coming,” she said, “and hid there to see what sort of man you were, before I risked speaking. I did my best to reassure her.


What had become of her now? In the disturbed state of my mind, it was useless to think of going to bed, when I at last got back to my chambers in Clement’s Inn. I cannot say with truth that the terrible inference which those words suggested flashed upon me like a new revelation. Before many hours elapsed it would be necessary to start on my journey to Cumberland.

That was my first thought, though I shrank selfishly from confronting it. Had the forlorn creature come to any harm? Other thoughts followed, on which it was less harrowing to dwell. But the idea of absolute insanity which we all associate with the very name of an Asylum, had, I can honestly declare, never occurred to me, in connection with her.

Had she been traced and captured by the men in the chaise? I sat down and tried, first to sketch, then to read—but the woman in white got between me and my pencil, between me and my book. I had seen nothing, in her language or her actions, to justify it at the time; and even with the new light thrown on her by the words which the stranger had addressed to the policeman, I could see nothing to justify it now. Where had she stopped the cab?

Assisted the victim of the most horrible of all false imprisonments to escape; or cast loose on the wide world of London an unfortunate creature, whose actions it was my duty, and every man’s duty, mercifully to control? I turned sick at heart when the question occurred to me, and when I felt self-reproachfully that it was asked too late. What had I done? Some of the strange questions put to me by the woman in white, after my ill-considered promise to leave her free to act as she pleased, had suggested the conclusion either that she was naturally flighty and unsettled, or that some recent shock of terror had disturbed the balance of her faculties.


Hale got up, and stood with his elbow on the chimney-piece, leaning his head on his hand, musing over something, and from time to time sighing deeply. “I am not so indifferent to her as she believes,” thought he to himself. His visitor was a different man to what he had seen him before at the wedding-breakfast, and at dinner to-day; a lighter, cleverer, more worldly man, and, as such, dissonant to Mr. Her mother came into the room before this whirl of thoughts was adjusted into anything like order.

Then she took it into her head that, after all, his lightness might be but assumed, to cover a bitterness of disappointment which would have been stamped on her own heart if she had loved and been rejected. Hale, smiling faintly,—“trying to steal some of their bravery; but it is of no use—no use—I cannot help feeling it acutely.” “You could not understand it all, if I told you—my anxiety, for years past, to know whether I had any right to hold my living—my efforts to quench my smouldering doubts by the authority of the Church. They proceeded to the house to find Mrs.

“I have been reading to-day of the two thousand who were ejected from their churches,”—continued Mr. She forgot that he had not made them an offer. At the last moment, Henry Lennox’s real self broke through the crust. He was gone.

Hale, whose whereabouts had been quite forgotten by them. “But, papa, have you well considered? He made her take a chair by him; he stirred the fire, snuffed the candles, and sighed once or twice before he could make up his mind to say—and it came out with a jerk after all—“Margaret! Margaret could not bear the sight of the suspense, which was even more distressing to her father than to herself.

Yet, after all, Margaret had to wait a long time in the drawing-room before her mother came down. As a proof of it, I believe I love you more than ever—if I do not hate you—for the disdain with which you have listened to me during this last half-hour. But she soon felt it was not about anything, which having only lately and suddenly occurred, could have given rise to any complicated thoughts, that her father wished to speak to her. She felt a tinge of contempt mingle itself with her pain at having refused him.

“Is that tapestry thing of immediate consequence? He was almost as anxious to take his departure as she was for him to leave; but a few minutes light and careless talking, carried on at whatever effort, was a sacrifice which he owed to his mortified vanity, or his self-respect. No more deep blue skies or crimson and amber tints. I will answer any questions this once, but after to-night let us never speak of it again.

He glanced from time to time at her sad and pensive face. Hale sipped his tea in abstracted silence; Margaret had the responses all to herself. how she could have loved him if he had but been different, with a difference which she felt, on reflection, to be one that went low—deep down. Margaret had to shake off the recollections of what had been done and said through the day, and turn a sympathising listener to the account of how Dixon had complained that the ironing-blanket had been burnt again; and how Susan Lightfoot had been seen with artificial flowers in her bonnet, thereby giving evidence of a vain and giddy character.

After tea Mr. Lennox’s proposal. it seems so terrible, so shocking,” said Margaret, suddenly bursting into tears. Margaret felt stunned, and unable to recover her self-possession enough to join in the trivial conversation that ensued between her father and Mr.

Margaret could not tell what to say; it seemed to her as terribly mysterious as if her father were about to turn Mahometan. How different men were to women! Her beautiful lip curled in a slight disdain. Hale, at last, in a sort of sudden desperate way, that made her start.

It is all myself. “Margaret, don’t despise me; I have a heart, notwithstanding all this good-for-nothing way of talking. She showed it by brushing away viciously at Margaret’s hair, under pretence of being in a great hurry to go to Mrs. Margaret went up to dress for the early tea, finding Dixon in a pretty temper from the interruption which a visitor had naturally occasioned on a busy day.

“Very serious to us all.” Hale, and wish her good-bye. Hale was puzzled. The whole tone of it annoyed her.

She was grave, and little disposed to speak; full of wonder when Mr. “Cast me upon some naked shore, Where I may tracke Only the print of some sad wracke, If thou be there though the seas roare, I shall no gentler calm implore.” Good-bye, Margaret—Margaret!” It was like the story of the eastern king, who dipped his head into a basin of water, at the magician’s command, and ere he instantly took it out went through the experience of a lifetime.

She sat by herself at the fire, with unlighted candles on the table behind her, thinking over the day, the happy walk, happy sketching, cheerful pleasant dinner, and the uncomfortable, miserable walk in the garden. Lennox would go, and allow her to relax into thought on the events of the last quarter of an hour. He played with some papers on the table in a nervous and confused manner, opening his lips to speak several times, but closing them again without having the courage to utter a word. The one staid foundation of her home, of her idea of her beloved father, seemed reeling and rocking.

Margaret, I will tell you about it. Margaret, how I love the holy Church from which I am to be shut out!” Lennox said that he must go directly if he meant to catch the five o’clock train. Lennox had never had the opportunity of having any private conversation with her father after her refusal, or else that would indeed be a very serious affair.

I can meet the consequences of my painful, miserable doubts; but it is an effort beyond me to speak of what has caused me so much suffering.” I mean, can you leave it and come into my study? It seemed to touch on and call out all the points of difference which had often repelled her in him; while yet he was the pleasantest man, the most sympathising friend, the person of all others who understood her best in Harley Street. “I do not give up hope.”

He could not go on for a moment or two. Here was she disturbed and unhappy, because her instinct had made anything but a refusal impossible; while he, not many minutes after he had met with a rejection of what ought to have been the deepest, holiest proposal of his life, could speak as if briefs, success, and all its superficial consequences of a good house, clever and agreeable society, were the sole avowed objects of his desires. The house was shut up for the evening. In the first place, Margaret felt guilty and ashamed of having grown so much into a woman as to be thought of in marriage; and secondly, she did not know if her father might not be displeased that she had taken upon herself to decline Mr.

It was well that, having made the round of the garden, they came suddenly upon Mr. She wondered how her father and mother could be so forgetful, so regardless of their companion through the day, as never to mention his name. “It is nothing about Frederick; the bishop would have nothing to do with that. Before a quarter of an hour was over, he had fallen into a way of conversing with quiet sarcasm; speaking of life in London and life in the country, as if he were conscious of his second mocking self, and afraid of his own satire.

I am going to leave Helstone.” He had not yet finished the pear, which he had delicately peeled in one long strip of silver-paper thinness, and which he was enjoying in a deliberate manner. Hale did not answer for a minute or two. Hale went out to consult with Dixon about some winter clothing for the poor.

Margaret was preparing her mother’s worsted work, and rather shrinking from the thought of the long evening, and wishing bed-time were come that she might go over the events of the day again. I want to speak to you about something very serious to us all.” It was a relief to all three when Mr.


I was too tired and out of spirits to eat or drink much, especially with the solemn servant waiting on me as elaborately as if a small dinner party had arrived at the house instead of a solitary man. The delay occasioned by this accident caused me to be too late for the branch train, by which I was to have gone on immediately. I sat down and tried, first to sketch, then to read—but the woman in white got between me and my pencil, between me and my book. I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me.

The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Assisted the victim of the most horrible of all false imprisonments to escape; or cast loose on the wide world of London an unfortunate creature, whose actions it was my duty, and every man’s duty, mercifully to control? She turned towards me immediately. She must have gone away in the clothes she wore when she came to us.

The driver was evidently discomposed by the lateness of my arrival. Other thoughts followed, on which it was less harrowing to dwell. We drove away slowly through the darkness in perfect silence. Don’t forget; a woman in white.

I had seen nothing, in her language or her actions, to justify it at the time; and even with the new light thrown on her by the words which the stranger had addressed to the policeman, I could see nothing to justify it now. We had passed one gate before entering the drive, and we passed another before we drew up at the house. I thought to myself, as I put out the candle; “the woman in white? I was received by a solemn man-servant out of livery, was informed that the family had retired for the night, and was then led into a large and lofty room where my supper was awaiting me, in a forlorn manner, at one extremity of a lonesome mahogany wilderness of dining-table.

“What shall I see in my dreams to-night?” But the idea of absolute insanity which we all associate with the very name of an Asylum, had, I can honestly declare, never occurred to me, in connection with her. Although the woman in white was still in my mind, the image of her seemed to have grown dull and faint already. or the unknown inhabitants of this Cumberland mansion?”

Where had she stopped the cab? She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young. Some of the strange questions put to me by the woman in white, after my ill-considered promise to leave her free to act as she pleased, had suggested the conclusion either that she was naturally flighty and unsettled, or that some recent shock of terror had disturbed the balance of her faculties. Pesca’s quaint announcement of the means by which he had procured me my present employment; the farewell evening I had passed with my mother and sister; even my mysterious adventure on the way home from Hampstead—had all become like events which might have occurred at some former epoch of my existence.

Before many hours elapsed it would be necessary to start on my journey to Cumberland. It was a relief when the hour came to lock my door, to bid farewell to London pursuits, London pupils, and London friends, and to be in movement again towards new interests and a new life. A little before nine o’clock, I descended to the ground-floor of the house. The view was such a surprise, and such a change to me, after my weary London experience of brick and mortar landscape, that I seemed to burst into a new life and a new set of thoughts the moment I looked at it.

My travelling instructions directed me to go to Carlisle, and then to diverge by a branch railway which ran in the direction of the coast. What had I done? That was my first thought, though I shrank selfishly from confronting it. In a quarter of an hour I was ready to be taken up to my bedchamber.

I cannot say with truth that the terrible inference which those words suggested flashed upon me like a new revelation. I’ll pay all expenses, and a fair reward into the bargain.” It was a strange sensation to be sleeping in the house, like a friend of the family, and yet not to know one of the inmates, even by sight! My first glance round me, as the man opened the door, disclosed a well-furnished breakfast-table, standing in the middle of a long room, with many windows in it.

The lady’s complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She left the window—and I said to myself, The lady is dark. Or was she still capable of controlling her own actions; and were we two following our widely parted roads towards one point in the mysterious future, at which we were to meet once more? It was, by my watch, nearly an hour and a half from the time of our leaving the station before I heard the sound of the sea in the distance, and the crunch of our wheels on a smooth gravel drive.

Circumstances that were but a few days old faded back in my memory, as if they had happened months and months since. The solemn man-servant of the night before met me wandering among the passages, and compassionately showed me the way to the breakfast-room. He was in that state of highly respectful sulkiness which is peculiar to English servants. A woman in white.”

In white, policeman. She has escaped from my Asylum. “If you or any of your men meet with the woman, stop her, and send her in careful keeping to that address. She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!

“The clothes we gave her were found on her bed. Had the forlorn creature come to any harm? I had to wait some hours; and when a later train finally deposited me at the nearest station to Limmeridge House, it was past ten, and the night was so dark that I could hardly see my way to the pony-chaise which Mr. A confused sensation of having suddenly lost my familiarity with the past, without acquiring any additional clearness of idea in reference to the present or the future, took possession of my mind.

In the disturbed state of my mind, it was useless to think of going to bed, when I at last got back to my chambers in Clement’s Inn. I turned sick at heart when the question occurred to me, and when I felt self-reproachfully that it was asked too late. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her attention. The roads were bad, and the dense obscurity of the night increased the difficulty of getting over the ground quickly.

As a misfortune to begin with, our engine broke down between Lancaster and Carlisle. Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted—never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it. Even the bustle and confusion at the railway terminus, so wearisome and bewildering at other times, roused me and did me good. Had she been traced and captured by the men in the chaise?

When I rose the next morning and drew up my blind, the sea opened before me joyously under the broad August sunlight, and the distant coast of Scotland fringed the horizon with its lines of melting blue. Fairlie had ordered to be in waiting for me. The solemn servant conducted me into a prettily furnished room—said, “Breakfast at nine o’clock, sir”—looked all round him to see that everything was in its proper place, and noiselessly withdrew. What had become of her now?

The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays.