Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/256

224 necessaries of life. All our days were much alike, except excursion days.

We rose at seven, cup of tea, and toilet. Then came my domestic work (Richard had plunged into literature at half-past seven): this consisted of what, I suppose, Shakspeare meant by "chronicling small beer"; but I had no fine lady's maid to do it for me—she would have been sadly out of place—ordering dinner, market, and accounts, needlework, doing the room, the washing, small cookery on the pan of charcoal, and superintending the roughest of the work as performed by Bernardo. Husbands are uncomfortable without "Chronicle," though they never see the petit détail going on, and like to keep up the pleasant illusion that it is done by magic. I thought it very good fun, this kind of gypsying. Breakfast at ten, write till two (journals and diaries kept up, etc.), dinner at two; then walk or ride or make an excursion; cup of tea on coming in, literature till ten, with a break of supper at eight, and at ten to bed: a delightfully healthy and wholesome life, both for mind and body, but one which I can't recommend to any one who cannot rough it, or who has no serious occupation, or lacks a very agreeable companion.

Sometimes, when Richard was busy writing, I would stroll far away into the valley to enjoy the sweet, balmy sea-breeze and smell of flowers, and drink in the soft, clear air, and would get far away from our little straggling, up-and-down town on its perch, and cross over barrancos and ravines and enjoy myself. One day, so occupied, I came upon a lovely quinta in a garden, full of fruits and flowers, a perfect forest of tall