liest and best. As it is a
three-hours' drive, the Man of Wrath is loud in his lamentations when
the special sort of weather comes which means, as experience has taught
him, this particular excursion. There must be deep snow, hard frost,
no wind, and a cloudless sky; and when, on waking up, I see these
conditions fulfilled, then it would need some very potent reason to keep
me from having out a sleigh and going off. It is, I admit, a hard day
for the horses; but why have horses if they are not to take you where
you want to go to, and at the time you want to go? And why should
not horses have hard days as well as everybody else? The Man of Wrath
loathes picnics, and has no eye for nature and frozen seas, and is
simply bored by a long drive through a forest that does not belong to
him; a single turnip on his own place is more admirable in his eyes than
the tallest, pinkest, straightest pine that ever reared its snow-crowned
head against the setting sunlight. Now observe the superiority of woman,
who sees that both are good, and after having gazed at the pine and been
made happy by its beauty, goes home and placidly eats the turnip. He
went once and only once to this particular place, and made us feel
so small by his blast behaviour that I never invite him now. It is a
beautiful spot, endless forest stretching along the shore as far as the
eye can reach; and after driving through it for miles you come suddenly,
at the end of an avenue of arching trees, upon the glistening, oily sea,
with the orange-coloured sails of distant fishing-smacks shilling in the
sunlight. Whenever I have been there it has been windless weather, and
the silence so profound that I could hear my pulses beating. The humming
of insects and the sudden scream of a jay are the only sounds in summer,
and in winter the stillness is the stillness of death.

Every paradise has its serpent, however, and this one is so infested by
mosquitoes during the season when picnics seem most natural, that those
of my visitors who have been taken there for a treat have invariably
lost their tempers, and made the quiet shores ring with their wailing
and lamentations. These despicable but irritating insects don't seem to
have anything to do but to sit in multitudes on the sand, waiting for
any prey Providence may send them; and as soon as the carriage appears
they rise up in a cloud, and rush to meet us, almost dragging us out
bodily, and never leave us until we drive away a