life of the historian might be short and precarious."

Othello's _occupation_ was gone. I made a pilgrimage to this spot on
the banks of the Lake of Geneva, and reached it towards the close of a
summer's evening, and saw all as the historian had described it; on
returning the next morning, the arbour and its creepers were lying
prostrate on the ground!

But the general and more prosperous lot--for a beneficent Creator has
willed a preponderance of happiness--is pictured by, probably, the
most pertinent and poetical simile ever devised. Keeping in view the
career of man on earth, "the river," says Pliny, "springs from the
earth, but its origin is in heaven. Its beginnings are insignificant,
and its infancy frivolous; it plays among the flowers of a meadow; it
waters a garden, or turns a little mill. Gathering strength in its
youth, it sometimes becomes wild and impetuous. Impatient of the
restraints it meets with in the hollows among the mountains, it is,
perhaps, restless and turbulent, quick in its turnings, and unsteady
in its course. In its more advanced age, it comes abroad into the
world, journeying with more prudence and discretion, through
cultivated fields; and no longer headstrong in its course, but
yielding to circumstances, it winds round what would trouble it to
overcome and remove. It passes through populous cities, and all the
busy haunts of man, tendering its services on every side, and becoming
the support and ornament of the country. Now increased by numerous
alliances, and advanced in its course, it loves peace and quiet, and
in majestic silence rolls on its mighty waters, until it is laid to
rest in the vast abyss."

CHAPTER III.

So long as I followed the course of the Loire, I was each day
surrounded, though not by magnificent, yet by a beautiful and happy
kind of scenery; but as often as I quitted its banks for a few days,
in order that I might pursue a more direct line towards the mountains
of Savoy, which now began dimly to appear in the horizon, so often was
I compelled to pass over a level and treeless soil, and with the
captive of twenty years imprisonment, when led into the street only to
be executed at the other end, I began to sigh, "O, that I might but
look on a green tree once more!" And I shall long remember the
cheerful and delightful sensation, as I again drew near the verdant
tracts, and then listened to the distant sound of the rapid Loire.

During one of these detours