gisterial
dignity, 'I hope I have arranged matters for you to see him. I wrote
about it; but I am afraid you will not be able to see him alone.'

Great was the satisfaction with which Hector took the conduct of the
expedition to Portland Island; though he was inclined to encumber it
with more lionizing than the good Doctor's full heart was ready for.
Few words could he obtain, as in the bright August sunshine they
steamed out from the pier at Weymouth, and beheld the gray sides of the
island, scarred with stone quarries, stretching its lengthening
breakwater out on one side, and on the other connected with the land by
the pale dim outline of the Chesill Bank. The water was dancing in
golden light; white-sailed or red-sailed craft plied across it; a ship
of the line lay under the lee of the island, practising gunnery, the
three bounds of her balls marked by white columns of spray each time of
touching the water, pleasure parties crowded the steamer; but to Dr.
May the cheerfulness of the scene made a depressing contrast to the
purpose of his visit, as he fixed his eyes on the squared outline of
the crest of the island, and the precipitous slope from thence to the
breakwater, where trains of loaded trucks rushed forth to the end,
discharged themselves, and hurried back.

Landing at the quay, in the midst of confusion, Hector smiled at the
Doctor's innocent proposal of walking, and bestowed him in a little
carriage, with a horse whose hard-worked patience was soon called out,
as up and up they went, through the narrow, but lively street, past the
old-fashioned inn, made memorable by a dinner of George III.; past the
fossil tree, clamped against a house like a vine; past heaps of slabs
ready for transport, a church perched up high on the slope, and a
parsonage in a place that looked only accessible to goats. Lines of
fortification began to reveal themselves, and the Doctor thought
himself arrived, but he was to wind further on, and be more struck with
the dreariness and inhospitality of the rugged rock, almost bare of
vegetation, the very trees of stone, and older than our creation; the
melancholy late ripening harvest within stone walls, the whole surface
furrowed by stern rents and crevices riven by nature, or cut into
greater harshness by the quarries hewn by man. The grave strangeness of
the region almost marked it out for a place of expiation, like the
mountain rising desolate from the sea, where Dante placed his p