Log_ with pleasure, because
it recalled familiar scenes to him. Much was explained by the
fact that the frontispiece of this edition was a delicate line-
engraving of Blewfields, the great lonely house in a garden of
Jamaican all-spice where for eighteen months he had worked as a
naturalist. He could not look at this print without recalling
exquisite memories and airs that blew from a terrestrial
paradise. But Michael Scott's noisy amorous novel of adventure
was an extraordinary book to put in the hands of a child who had
never been allowed to glance at the mildest and most febrifugal
story-book.

It was like giving a glass of brandy neat to someone who had
never been weaned from a milk diet. I have not read _Tom Cringle's
Log_ from that day to this, and I think that I should be unwilling
now to break the charm of memory, which may be largely illusion.
But I remember a great deal of the plot and not a little of the
language, and, while I am sure it is enchantingly spirited, I am
quite as sure that the persons it describes were far from being
unspotted by the world. The scenes at night in the streets of
Spanish Town surpassed not merely my experience, but, thank
goodness, my imagination. The nautical personages used, in their
conversations, what is called 'a class of language', and there
ran, if I am not mistaken, a glow and gust of life through the
romance from beginning to end which was nothing if it was not
resolutely pagan.

There were certain scenes and images in _Tom Cringle's Log_ which
made not merely a lasting impression upon my mind, but tinged my
outlook upon life. The long adventures, fightings and escapes,
sudden storms without, and mutinies within, drawn forth as they
were, surely with great skill, upon the fiery blue of the
boundless tropical ocean, produced on my inner mind a sort of
glimmering hope, very vaguely felt at first, slowly developing,
long stationary and faint, but always tending towards a belief
that I should escape at last from the narrowness of the life we
led at home, from this bondage to the Law and the Prophets.

I must not define too clearly, nor endeavour too formally to
insist on the blind movements of a childish mind. But of this I
am quite sure, that the reading and re-reading of _Tom Cringle's
Log_ did more than anything else, in this critical eleventh year
of my life, to give fortitude to my individuality, which was in
great danger--as I now see--of succumbing to the pressu