and steam, they take to
bed, and on the ninth day fever hurries them off, victims to their
confidence in that treacherous tube. But we mean to ask have you an eye,
an ear, and a sixth sense, anonymous and instinctive, for all the
prognosticating sights and sounds, and motions and shapes, of nature?
Have you studied, in silence and solitude, the low, strange, and
spirit-like whisperings, that often, when bird and bee are mute, come
and go, here and there, now from crag, now from coppice, and now from
moor, all over the sultry stillness of the clouded landscape? Have you
listened among mountains to the voice of streams, till you heard them
prophesying change? Have you so mastered the occult science of mists, as
that you can foretell each proud or fair Emergency, and the hour when
grove, precipice, or plain, shall in sudden revelation be clothed with
the pomp of sunshine? Are all Bewick's birds, and beasts, and fishes
visible to your eyes in the woods, wastes, and waves of the clouds? And
know ye what aerial condor, dragon, and whale, respectively portend? Are
the Fata Morgana as familiar to you as the Aberdeen Almanac? When a
mile-square hover of crows darkens air and earth, or settling loads
every tree with sable fruitage, are you your own augur, equally as when
one raven lifts up his hoary blackness from a stone, and sails sullenly
off with a croak, that gets fiercer and more savage in the lofty
distance? Does the leaf of the forest twinkle futurity? the lonely
lichen brighten or pale its lustre with change? Does not the gift of
prophecy dwell with the family of the violets and the lilies? The
prescient harebells, do they not let drop their closing blossoms when
the heavens are niggard of their dews, or uphold them like cups thirsty
for wine, when the blessing, yet unfelt by duller animal life, is
beginning to drop balmily down from the rainy cloud embosomed in the
blue of a midsummer's meridian day?

Forgive these friendly interrogatories. Perhaps you are weather-wiser
than ourselves; yet for not a few years we bore the name of "The Man of
the Mountains;" and, though no great linguists, we hope that we know
somewhat more than the vocabulary of the languages of calm and storm.
Remember that we are now at Ambleside--and one week's residence there
may let you into some of the secrets of the unsteady Cabinet of St
Cloud.

One advice we give you, and by following it you cannot fail to be happy
at Ambleside, and everywher