play - such charms of sight and sound as all the Galleries on earth
can but poorly suggest.

So dreamy is the murmur of the sea below my window, that I may have
been here, for anything I know, one hundred years. Not that I have
grown old, for, daily on the neighbouring downs and grassy hill-
sides, I find that I can still in reason walk any distance, jump
over anything, and climb up anywhere; but, that the sound of the
ocean seems to have become so customary to my musings, and other
realities seem so to have gone aboard ship and floated away over
the horizon, that, for aught I will undertake to the contrary, I am
the enchanted son of the King my father, shut up in a tower on the
sea-shore, for protection against an old she-goblin who insisted on
being my godmother, and who foresaw at the font - wonderful
creature! - that I should get into a scrape before I was twenty-
one. I remember to have been in a City (my Royal parent's
dominions, I suppose), and apparently not long ago either, that was
in the dreariest condition. The principal inhabitants had all been
changed into old newspapers, and in that form were preserving their
window-blinds from dust, and wrapping all their smaller household
gods in curl-papers. I walked through gloomy streets where every
house was shut up and newspapered, and where my solitary footsteps
echoed on the deserted pavements. In the public rides there were
no carriages, no horses, no animated existence, but a few sleepy
policemen, and a few adventurous boys taking advantage of the
devastation to swarm up the lamp-posts. In the Westward streets
there was no traffic; in the Westward shops, no business. The
water-patterns which the 'Prentices had trickled out on the
pavements early in the morning, remained uneffaced by human feet.
At the corners of mews, Cochin-China fowls stalked gaunt and