lands, with but a slender expectation of ever beholding them with
bodily sight, but none the less well prepared to understand and
appreciate them should the opportunity arrive. And now, suddenly, it
had arrived, and they were on the way to the regions of their dreams,
with the prospect of comparative affluence added. They had nearly
twelve years of earthly sojourn together before them, the afternoon
sunshine to be clouded a little near the close by the husband's
failing health, but glorified more and more by mutual love, and
enriched with memories of all that had before been unfulfilled
imaginings. This voyage eastward was the space of contemplation
between the two periods, and the balm of its tranquillity well
symbolized the peace of soul and mind with which they awaited what the
horizons were to disclose.

The right way to approach England for the first time is not by the
west coast, but by the south, as Julius Caesar did, beckoned on by the
ghostly, pallid cliffs that seem to lift themselves like battlements
against the invader. It is historically open to question whether there
would have been any Roman occupation, or any Saxon or Norman one
either, for that matter, but for the coquetry of those chalk cliffs.
An adventurer, sighting the low and marshy shores of Lancashire, and
muddying his prows in the yellow waters of the Mersey, would be apt to
think that such a land were a good place to avoid. But the race of
adventurers has long since died out, and their place is occupied by
the wide-flying cormorants of commerce, to whom mud flats and rock
deserts present elysian beauties, provided only there be profit in
them. One kind of imagination has been superseded by another, and both
are necessary to the full exploitation of this remarkable globe that
we inhabit.