hills--that Australia was a new country that needed to be "opened up." He
quoted Manville Fenn and other writers of boys' adventure stories thirty
or forty years old to show the dangers of Australia and his own
indomitable courage in tackling them: he told of Captain Cook's heart
and many other blood-curdling tales, and was greeted with ironical
cheers and laughter. They explained to him at great length all about the
civilization of Australia, and when, an hour after the Devon coast had
dropped below the horizon he became miserably sea-sick, they formed a
procession before him, carrying fire buckets, brandy and beer to his
assistance.

Marcella was muddled. She frowned and got no nearer a solution to her
puzzles, until she remembered that, right at the top of her trunk, put
in at the last moment, was a Golden Treasury her mother gave her years
ago.

She turned the pages to the end, looking for something she remembered
that seemed to fit in with her mood. In the Ode on the Intimations of
Immortality she read it--

"Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,"

she murmured. "Well, that means that I'm not the only one. Wordsworth
evidently got worried about things like I do. But it's the
cruelty--that's what I can't understand."

There was a little comfort in that thought as she fell asleep: it gave
her a sense of comradeliness that anyone so eminently sane as Wordsworth
should have had "blank misgivings."