luck"--with the result.
We leave, if bills are paid, in two days. Captain Abrane and Mr. Potts
left this afternoon; just enough to carry them home. Papa and your
blissful sister out driving. Riette within her four walls and signing
herself,

'THE PRISONER OF CHILLON.'

CHAPTER XIII. AN IRRUPTION. OF MISTRESS GOSSIP IN BREACH OF THE
CONVENTION

'It is a dark land,' Carinthia said, on seeing our Island's lowered
clouds in swift motion, without a break of their folds, above the sheer
white cliffs. --She said it, we know. That poor child Carinthia Jane,
when first she beheld Old England's shores, tossing in the packet-boat
on a wild Channel sea, did say it and think it, for it is in the family
that she did; and no wonder that she should, the day being showery from
the bed of the sun, after a frosty three days, at the close of autumn.
We used to have an eye of our own for English weather before printed
Meteorological Observations and Forecasts undertook to supplant the
shepherd and the poacher, and the pilot with his worn brown leather
telescope tucked beneath his arm. All three would have told you, that
the end of a three days' frost in the late season of the year and the
early, is likely to draw the warm winds from the Atlantic over Cornish
Land's End and Lizard.

Quite by chance of things, Carinthia Jane looked on the land of her
father and mother for the first time under those conditions. There can
be no harm in quoting her remark. Only--I have to say it--experience
causes apprehension, that we are again to be delayed by descriptions,
and an exposition of feelings; taken for granted,--of course, in a
serious narrative; which it really seems these moderns think designed
for a frequent arrest of the actors in the story and a searching of the
internal state of this one or that one of them: who is laid out stark
naked and probed and expounded, like as in the celebrated picture by a
great painter--and we, thirsting for events as we are, are to stop
to enjoy a lecture on Anatomy. And all the while the windows of the
lecture-room are rattling, if not the whole fabric shaking, with
exterior occurrences or impatience for them to come to pass. Every
explanation is sure to be offered by the course events may take; so do,
in mercy, I say, let us bide for them.

She thought our Island all the darker because Henrietta had induced her
to talk on the boat of her mountain home and her last morning there for
the