162 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



to ascertain to what extent the man in middle life would 

 verify the observations of the lad, to recall early incidents, 

 revisit remembered scenes, return on old feelings, and see 

 who were dead and who alive among the casual acquaint- 

 ances of nearly a quarter of a century ago. The morning of 

 Wednesday rose dark with fog and rain, but the wind had 

 fallen ; and as I could not afford to miss seeing Conon-side, I 

 sallied out under cover of an umbrella. I crossed the bridge, 

 and reached the pleasure-grounds of Conon-house. The river 

 was big in flood : it was exactly such a river Con on as I had 

 lost sight of in the winter of 1 821 ; and I had to give up all 

 hope of wading into its fords, as I used to do early in the 

 autumn of that year, and pick up the pearl muscles that lie 

 so thickly among the stones at the bottom. I saw, however, 

 amid a thicket of bushes by the river-side, a heap of broken 

 shells, where some herd-boy had been carrying on such a pearl 

 fishery as I had sometimes used to carry on in my own be- 

 half so long before ; and I felt it was just something to see 

 it. The flood eddied past, dark and heavy, sweeping over 

 bulwark and bank. The low-stemmed alders that rose on 

 islet and mound seemed shorn of half their trunks in the tide ; 

 here and there an elastic branch bent to the current, and rose 

 and bent again ; and now a tuft of withered heath came float- 

 ing down, and now a soiled wreath of foam. How vividly 

 'the past rose up before me ! boyish day-dreams forgotten 

 for twenty years, the fossils of an early formation of mind, 

 produced at a period when the atmosphere of feeling was 

 warmer than now, and the immaturities of the mental king- 

 dom grew rank and large, like the ancient Cryptogamiae, and 

 bore no specific resemblance to the productions of a present 

 time. I had passed in the neighbourhood the first season I 

 anywhere spent among strangers, at an age when home is not 

 a country, nor a province even, but simply a little spot of 

 earth inhabited by friends and relatives ; and the rude verses, 



