glanced sharply at Alice's collapsed charms (she looks like Samson shorn of his strength), rings the bell for prayers. He is half through the chapter before the servants can get in at the door; but that is of little consequence, they would not hear a word if they were present. Breakfast passes over better than might be expected. There are so many safe remarks we can make about Periwinkle; every man and woman we see is not an enemy, the mention of whose name must be shunned as the plague; and I am even able to provoke a smile by remarking that it is difficult to hear the sermon on Sunday evenings, because the sailors snore so loudly.
I think that if we were to travel much we should find plenty to talk to him about, become quite colloquial in fact. Ah! travel's a wonderful thing for enlarging the mind. No wonder splendid Will said, "Home-keeping youths have ever homely wits" (of course he meant that for girls as well).
After breakfast our troubles begin. We go for a walk, and make the depressing discovery that in every deep there is a lower depth, and that, bad as the Silverbridge walks were, the Periwinkle ones are infinitely, immeasurably worse.
The governor is apparently as impervious to shingle as to ploughed fields, for he leads the van without a falter, while we flounder, slip, and stumble after him like a badly drilled squad of infantry. The sun is fiercely smiting our backs, blistering our cheeks and noses, making us feel that our bodies have suddenly grown gross and heavy and suffocating; our clothes might be of woollen, so irritatingly do they chafe us. It is one of those broiling mornings when existence under a green tree is bad enough, but existence taking a race over a glaring shingle is diabolical.
We are bound for the rocks now uncovered by the receding tide, and over them we are going to Cod's Bay, a fishing village of evil reputation and bad smells, that hides its dirty head round the
