do proper homage to the animal Nature
makes the woman be.' Oh, pish, sir!--as Meeson Corby had the habit of
exclaiming when Abrane's 'fiddler' argues him into a corner. The fellow
can fiddle fine things and occasionally clear sense:--'Men hating Nature
are insane. Women and Nature are close. If it is rather general to hate
Nature and maltreat women, we begin to see why the world is a mad world.'
That is the tune of the fiddler's fiddling. As for him, something
protects him. He was the slave of Countess Livia; like Abrane, Mallard,
Corby, St. Ombre, young Cressett, and the dozens. He is now her master.
Can a man like that be foolish, in saying of the Countess Carinthia, she
is 'not only quick to understand, she is in the quick of understanding'?
Gower Woodseer said it of her in Wales, and again on the day of his walk
up to London from Esslemont, after pedestrian exercise, which may heat
the frame, but cools the mind. She stamped that idea on a thoughtful
fellow.

He's a Welshman. They are all excitable,--have heads on hound's legs for
a flying figure in front. Still, they must have an object, definitely
seen by them--definite to them if dim to their neighbours; and it will
run in the poetic direction: and the woman to win them, win all classes
of them, within so short a term, is a toss above extraordinary. She is
named Carinthia--suitable name for the Welsh pantomimic procession. Or
cry out the word in an amphitheatre of Alpine crags,--it sounds at home.

She is a daughter of the mountains,--should never have left them. She is
also a daughter of the Old Buccaneer--no poor specimen of the fighting
Englishman of his day. According to Rose Mackrell, he, this Old
Buccaneer, it was, who, by strange adventures, brought the great Welsh
mines into the family! He would not be ashamed in spying through his
nautical glass, up or down, at his daughter's doings. She has not yet
developed a taste for the mother's tricks:--the mother, said to have been
a kindler. That Countess of Cressett was a romantic little fly-away bird.
Both parents were brave: the daughter would inherit gallantry. She
inherits a kind of thwarted beauty. Or it needs the situation seen in
Wales: her arms up and her unaffrighted eyes over the unappeasable growl.
She had then the beauty coming from the fathom depths, with the torch of
Life in the jaws of Death to light her: beauty of the nether kingdom
mounting to an upper place in the higher. Her beauty recognized,