CORRESPONDENCE.

A LAZY JOURNEY.—V.

• These short months of absence seem to us, on looking back, so How curious it is, afterwards, to remember and to write. I am sitting again at the same study-window, and remembering.

short, and yet so long. So much has been added to the ex- perience.; so !little changed in the quiet round of home, that " kindred-point " with Heaven, when we come back to the trivial round and common task again. What a philosopher was that -former Member of St. Stephen's who took to a bush-life, and coning home after years of banishment, was met by a fellow-Member with a St. Stephen's report. " Dear me !" he said, " is that old nonsense going on still P" it is -going on still, outside •and in, much as before. It !is not absolutely rain- ing, but it rained an hour ago, and it will again in another hour. My bookcases look at me with the same eyes ; one more volume of the forthcoming edition of " Titmareh " lies unopened on my etudy-table, and the Swindle-tax collector has called. When the present inter-reign of insanity is over, and we have given

• up thinking -that the greatness of Grumble Island consists in being "talked about" on the Continent—Terre-folle and Geist- laud were a good deal ;talked about nine years ago, and do not seem much the bettor for it—I wonder if Sir Strafford Dove- cote will remit conscience-money to his taxpayers in contradic- tion of the usual process, for having enforcedly supplied amusement to him and his friends P (It is raining again already ; I was too sanguine. There is a race at Horseydown, hard by, and the drags are on the road. The class of holiday- makers is changed, but the melancholy and the mackintoshes are as before.) lt rano& of course, during the diligence-journey. But I am inclined to extract the sweets from weather rather than the bitters, and was grateful for the absence of dust and glare, which make many a diligence-journey little short of intolerable. That the coupo was constructed with the same ingeuuity of ill as the berths of L.S.W.R., in a ma,uner suggestive of the trouble the architect must have taken to make his fellow-creatures wretched, as far as in him lay, need not be said. Berths, dili- gences, cabs, theatrical dressing-rooms, and many other places, aro all studies in the same direction, much as criticisms, Impeyism, and other developments of the human intellect are lu their respective ways. The discomfort of others is a noble object, variously ensued.

But the sun upon our journey was more spotsome than has whom the colours themselves were made. Above all did we been usual with him of late, and treated us to many beautiful love to kneel unchecked, though but for a minute or two, and and fitful effects of light and colour. The road through the with no very articulate petition, perhaps, on our lips or in our pastures and apple-orchards between Feuille-morte and Eau- hearts, in each church we entered, side by side. Surely the re- qui-dort is a very wonder of quiet beauty, where the over- jection of that hospitality of worship by the habitof our Reformed worn world seems to stand at gaze for a moment, to take Church, is our Church's worst enemy. Surely to " keep open breath, and suddenly to have wearied of house " is a Church's first duty, and better worthy her atten- And everything but sleep.

Beautiful stretches of rich, green laud ; undulating hollows and benediction fell on us through the great stained windows, when fern-grown slopes ; bright streams, prattling down by quaint we rose from those short, but earnest acts of prayer. Who and disused mills ; sleepy browa village 5, only half astir ; waves knows what added nerve each act like that may bring, to fight of foliage of a quiet shale, varied here and there by one of out the battle with the world and Impeyism with courage and Nature's more daring audacities of colour ; sturdy little kiue, with honour, and to avow more and more the dear old faith broweiug, away by the road-side, comfortably tethered to keep which, in the forecasts of some, seems even threatened with a them from straying, —the picture that unrolled itself before new era of persecution,—this time, in the name of St. Nil P At our eyes was a perfect one, in its completeness of accurate present a mere persecution of mind, it may yet serve, perhaps, detail, where the Master-Painter's power of hand and eye had small as the signs of union thus far are, to draw the different

missed and forgotten nothing. The lumbering old coach, whose

praise3 we sang—to be superseded by the iron horse in another of Rome, with all her powerful influence over reverent and year, and to pass into the limbo of inutilities—gave us full time, imaginative minds, would be stronger in the van of battle, if in its dawdling course, to take the scene well in. The birds she could teach herself not to pervert the saying of the common were in their best force for us. The " gazze ladre " hopped and Founder into her present motto for herself,—" I am the Vine :

hovered round us one after another, as we tried to count them after the fashion of old story-book travel, and to speculate-what they might portend. But the pied spies came in numbers which Eau-qui-dort provided us with much quiet amusement of

defied augury. Woodpeckers, with red beaks, came out to a kind in keeping with our unexcited frame of mind. I laugh at us, with the odd, jocular sound noted. by Maurice de revelled in a barber-politician, who trimmed my beard for Guerin, and White of Selborne ; the starlings chorused, as if me as only a Terre-follese barber can trim it, and had filled his they wanted to be taken for nightingales; and once the apparition den with astonishing pictures and histories of the Boomerang of a bright blue jay—rarer avis in terris—startled us into a cry

of admiration. That forest-haunting beauty does not much affect the common roads of men ; go and look for him, "Dons los boil do Meudon, par une nuit d'dt6."

So we rolled on down the hill which leads from Feuille-morte, scissors suspended over my head, about the ruined prospects of and up that which twines into Eau-qui-dort; Mrs. Balbus's his perverted country. I was glad to see him surrounded by usual admirer being present in a stray tourist from Belle- all the signs of personal prosperity, and wished as well Etoile, who sat in front of us by the coachman's side and to him as I did to his coffee-house-keeping neighbour, shut out his proportion of the view, but made amends, who prospered neither less nor more, but rejoiced over the as far as ho could, by turning round and beaming on salvation of the Terrefolle Republic with feeling quite as us with a loving, if rather eiderous, smile, and showing genuine, and saw in the anti-Jesuit law the perfection of an. intense desire to enter into talk. But Mrs. Balbus and legislative wisdom. I have in my time been something I were not favourably impressed, and kept the secret of any exorcised by good Bishop Berkeley's views of matter, and specu- acquaintance with his tongue ;—which enabled the coachman lated on the difference between a stone and the idea-of-a-stone as to think us good subjects for imposition, and to set us down, on puzzling in its purpose ; but it would be an odd vein of study to our arrival, at a very third-rate inn, with whose landlord he had follow out in questions of politics. What is the difference

made a compact. That landlord at like a spider in his entrance- hall, awaiting whom he might devour, but left the task of deceit to the coachman and waiter, and only looked ghoulishly disap- pointed when we hired a stranger to shoulder our baggage, and passed on to have our blood sucked elsewhere. I know few lovelier spots of earth than Eau-qui-dort ; few most P We are both of us honest in our opinions, and surely more gracious views than the great panorama seen from its one must be right and the other wrong. Or are the opinions. tiny botanic garden, stretching below, on the one side, as of one or the opinions of both the mere Berkleiau phantom of a far as the eye can look, along the long, white road, which substance, with an existence only in our minds ? Do we hold seems to have been made for a schoolboy's example, to show them, or do we but think we do ?

" Days and hours, tion than the paltry quarrels which occupy her now. The Blown buds of barren flowers, reform might even be better worthy of a Bishop's medi- Desires, and dreams, and powers, tations, than the blessings of vivisection. My wife and

I could never help feeling that some new and unseen forms of profession together for defence. The mother-Church and there are no branches."

nation, and the luckless boy—" Que diable allait-il faire dams cette genre P"—who was at this time the hero of the popular prints on both sides of the water. He was a staunch Vendettist, the honest barber ; really touching in his expressions of loyalty

and regret, and in the Cassandrics which he poured out, with So we rolled on down the hill which leads from Feuille-morte, scissors suspended over my head, about the ruined prospects of and up that which twines into Eau-qui-dort; Mrs. Balbus's his perverted country. I was glad to see him surrounded by usual admirer being present in a stray tourist from Belle- all the signs of personal prosperity, and wished as well Etoile, who sat in front of us by the coachman's side and to him as I did to his coffee-house-keeping neighbour, shut out his proportion of the view, but made amends, who prospered neither less nor more, but rejoiced over the as far as ho could, by turning round and beaming on salvation of the Terrefolle Republic with feeling quite as us with a loving, if rather eiderous, smile, and showing genuine, and saw in the anti-Jesuit law the perfection of an. intense desire to enter into talk. But Mrs. Balbus and legislative wisdom. I have in my time been something I were not favourably impressed, and kept the secret of any exorcised by good Bishop Berkeley's views of matter, and specu- acquaintance with his tongue ;—which enabled the coachman lated on the difference between a stone and the idea-of-a-stone as to think us good subjects for imposition, and to set us down, on puzzling in its purpose ; but it would be an odd vein of study to our arrival, at a very third-rate inn, with whose landlord he had follow out in questions of politics. What is the difference

between a political Right and idea-of-a-Right, after all P Why

is my best friend a Tory, and I a Whig P And why are we

mutually agreed to hold our tongues about all political problems, as being those about which men care the least and quarrel the I know few lovelier spots of earth than Eau-qui-dort ; few most P We are both of us honest in our opinions, and surely more gracious views than the great panorama seen from its one must be right and the other wrong. Or are the opinions. tiny botanic garden, stretching below, on the one side, as of one or the opinions of both the mere Berkleiau phantom of a far as the eye can look, along the long, white road, which substance, with an existence only in our minds ? Do we hold seems to have been made for a schoolboy's example, to show them, or do we but think we do ?

him practically the meaning of a straight line which hath no We went to the theatre of Eau-qui-dort, and we went on turning, with inviting chilteaux nestling into trees on either Sunday. I did not conceal it then, and I do not now. It cost hand of it; on the other side, over a wide intervening space of us the friendship of Mrs. Mincing, who sits out two long ser- plain and pasture, of river and estuary, out to the cliffs and vices one day a week, and seasoned the table d'hôte with general boulders of the great Channel-line, with the crested waves uneharity. She hated the Terre-follese, she told me, and could whitening the horizon, and framing in the distance, as if it not bear sitting among them at dinner. I said that it was diffi- were some giant altar-piece, the God-built pile of the Arch- cult to travel much in Terre-folle without meeting a few Terre- angel's Mount. We drank our very fill, for a short spell of follese ; and she reflectively admitted that it might be so. The happy days, of this deep draught of creative beauty, which Sunday question disposed of me finally in her opinion, and seemed to give fresh cause and colour to the spirit of thank- barbed her words. She had been much shocked, to start with, fulness which filled my wife's heart and mine. I love the at our habit of kneeling in casual churches on week-days. Such grand tradition which sets the church-doors wide open to the suspicions of profanity are not uncommon. I was guilty, not passer-by, when the thoughts born of such scenes as these lie long ago, of suggesting to Shrimpington, the eminent religious too deep for anything but prayer. My wife and I were bookseller—or should I say, seller of religious books P—a collection agreed, it is true, in our reprobation of the trumpery little of household prayers on a new model which had occurred to statues and images of grotesque wood (so un-anthropomorphic, me. The notion struck him much, commercially, and he would that they look like images set up for the worship of Evolution, have entertained the question of publication, " if I had been a and I would suggest to the Impeyites to buy them up for clergyman." I thought the argument odd ; but detected in his the purpose), which go so far to spoil the symmetric beauty answer the undercurrent of an idea thatit was rather blasphemous of the holy places of the Roman creed ; but so were we in a layman to pray. Mrs. Mincing was avenged, however, and in our love for the noble altars and rich colours, which are our sin punished, by the worst stage-playing r ever saw, mans surely but a fit offering to the God of the Exodus, by and for plots in its ensemble of badness as only a Terre-follese performs

ante can at times be. The play was called an " opera," and is an idiotcy, which has been running in a translated form for many months in Babylon. The absolute baldness and un- meaning of the thing were made conspicuous by the Eau-qui- ilort setting ; but the groundhogs rejoiced, and all was well. The theatre had been a large room, and in the room next to it I had attended in the morning the Grumble-Island service with Mrs. Mincing ; the rest of the large quadrangular building, originally a barrack, being used as a boys' school. As odd a jumble of proximities, I thought, as is often brought together. But the barrack is coming back again, and church, school, and theatre are all under notice to quit.

The evening before we left Eau-qui-dort, Mrs. Balbus and I were hailed in the street by a familiar face and a delighted grin. The boy-waiter of Feuille-morte had suddenly started up before us, in his habit as he waited. " Tiens !" I said, struck by a thought. " Tu es l'autre jumean !" " Oui, Monsieur !" he shouted, delightedly, and took us at once under his protection ; the very moral of his brother, whom he loved with a true recip- rocal affection. Never iu my life have I seen twindom so pro- nounced ; and were I a theatrical speculator, I would hire those two boys as they are, and bring them out as the Dromios in Shakespeare's comedy. Ho chattered by the hour, and told us all about his brother, as the brother had told us all about him ; and I believe that if any man were to rob either of a righteous fee, the other would feel an instantaneous pang iu his pocket, as Dei Franchi felt the sword-stab. The voice, face, dress, thought, °everything, were identity ; and the last face we saw in the place was the twin's, grinning a benediction after us in the early morning, as we rolled of in a lumbersome omnibus for the