TWO YOUNG NATURALISTS. 43 



became acquainted with during his voyages interested 

 him but little. "Skin, more or less dark, clothes 

 of a little different fashion : except that, people like 

 you and me," these were all his ethnographical 

 ideas. 



And yet, notwithstanding his apparently unemo- 

 tional disposition, the love of his native soil had 

 gradually made itself felt, and had ended, as is so 

 frequently the case with sentiments of a painful 

 nature, by becoming a fixed idea by which he was 

 completely possessed. He continually remarked, " All 

 that is not worth Trouville." In his childhood his 

 curiosity made excursions into strange lands ; now 

 that he had the lands themselves before his eyes he 

 saw them almost without notice. His thoughts went to 

 and fro continually between Courseulles and the bay 

 of the Seine, the two spots that he knew so well but 

 should perhaps never revisit. Often and often, when 

 he sailed amidst the verdant isles of the interior sea 

 of Japan, some touch of landscape, some tree, some 

 trifle, would lead him back to his favourite idea. If 

 some pagoda reared in the distance the outline of its 

 quaintly sculptured roof against the azure blue, it 

 recalled to him the great tower of Ouistreharn or the 

 twin steeples of Delivrande, and instinctively his ear 

 would endeavour to catch the sounds of the evening 

 hymn that the land breeze wafts to the sailor's ear. 

 And often of a night, during the long hours of his 



