rbarous. But in those days the solicitation of the picturesque
had been revived by a poet of some impassioned rhetoric, and two devotees
could hardly meet, as the two met here, and not be mutually obscurants.

They stepped ashore in turn on the same small shoot of land where a
farm-house near a chapel in the shadow of cliffs did occasional service
for an inn. Each had intended to pass a day and a night in this lonely
dwelling-place by the lake, but a rival was less to be tolerated there
than in love, and each awaited the other's departure, with an air that
said: 'You are in my sunlight'; and going deeper, more sternly: 'Sir, you
are an offence to Nature's pudency!'

Woodseer was the more placable of the two; he had taken possession of the
bench outside, and he had his note-book and much profundity to haul up
with it while fish were frying. His countryman had rushed inside to avoid
him, and remained there pacing the chamber like a lion newly caged. Their
boatmen were brotherly in the anticipation of provision and payment.

After eating his fish, Woodseer decided abruptly, that as he could not
have the spot to himself, memorable as it would have been to intermarry
with Nature in so sacred a welldepth of the mountains, he had better be
walking and climbing. Another boat paddling up the lake had been spied:
solitude was not merely shared with a rival, but violated by numbers. In
the first case, we detest the man; in the second, we fly from an outraged
scene. He wrote a line or so in his book, hurriedly paid his bill, and
started, full of the matter he had briefly committed to his pages.

At noon, sitting beside the beck that runs from the lake, he was
overtaken by the gentleman he had left behind, and accosted in the
informal English style, with all the politeness possible to a nervously
blunt manner: 'This book is yours,--I have no doubt it is yours; I am
glad to be able to restore it; I should be glad to be the owner-writer of
the contents, I mean. I have to beg your excuse; I found it lying open; I
looked at the page, I looked through the whole; I am quite at your
mercy.'

Woodseer jumped at the sight of his note-book, felt for the emptiness of
his pocket, and replied: 'Thank you, thank you. It's of use to me, though
to no one else.'

'You pardon me?'

'Certainly. I should have done it myself.'

'I cannot offer you my apologies as a stranger.' Lord Fleetwood was the
name given.

Woodseer's plebeian was exchange