Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/54

54. After all, though I know you will not allow it, there is something very independent in this indifference. There were no tears at parting shed; There were no eyes to shed them.' I kept lamenting that I had not gone by sea. Who is it that says a happy quotation is a sudden treasure? I might have applied Lord Byron's lines so well—'With thee, my barque,' &c.—I had a most uncommonly pleasant journey down. Of my three companions, one was a middle-aged and middle-sized man, who alternately slept and steamed; the second may be emphatically described as a nobody, a young gentleman with red whiskers, very hot for this weather; but the third was an exceedingly gentlemanly and intelligent man, with, however, one fault, or rather misfortune, he was married—or I should have tried for a conquest.—It was to me something very amusing, and very new, (one grand half of amusement), to converse with a well-informed person, possessing a very proper appreciation, as Miss would say, of my being a very superior sort of person, and yet not having the slightest idea of my original sin, no thought of my taint of blue, no battery of looks erected against me. O for oblivion, and five hundred a year!—Not being now writing in the way of business, I shall spare you the flowers I have gathered, the trees I have seen, leaving you to beau-idealize them for yourself in Fate's garden. . . . This is not a gay time in the country, but prospects of future pleasure are dancing before me. I have invitations for Harrowgate and Scarborough, nay, a distant peep at Scotland. I am just in the humour in which tours are made, leaving no place