Which they do glare withal"?


Why not, then, try to discover a few of the Wonders of the Shore?
For wonders there are there around you at every step, stranger than
ever opium-eater dreamed, and yet to be seen at no greater expense
than a very little time and trouble.

Perhaps you smile, in answer, at the notion of becoming a
"Naturalist:" and yet you cannot deny that there must be a
fascination in the study of Natural History, though what it is is
as yet unknown to you. Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized
with the prevailing "Pteridomania," and are collecting and buying
ferns, with Ward's cases wherein to keep them (for which you have
to pay), and wrangling over unpronounceable names of species (which
seem to he different in each new Fern-book that they buy), till the
Pteridomania seems to you somewhat of a bore: and yet you cannot
deny that they find an enjoyment in it, and are more active, more
cheerful, more self-forgetful over it, than they would have been
over novels and gossip, crochet and Berlin-wool. At least you will
confess that the abomination of "Fancy-work" - that standing cloak
for dreamy idleness (not to mention the injury which it does to
poor starving needlewomen) - has all but vanished from your
drawing-room since the "Lady-ferns" and "Venus's hair" appeared;
and that you could not help yourself looking now and then at the
said "Venus's hair," and agreeing that Nature's real beauties were
somewhat superior to the ghastly woollen caricatures which they had
superseded.

You cannot deny, I say, that there is a fascination in this same