"You are a naval man, then, I presume?" said Burrel. The other answered in the affirmative, and his companion proceeded.
----"For nothing on earth could be more disagreeable to me, and I suppose to most landsmen, than a sail from any one given point of the globe's surface to another. When you speak of Sicily, however, you speak of a land that I too know well; and in regard to which I can enter into your enthusiasm. There are few lands more fertile in beauties of nature and association than Sicily, and Epicurean Calabria, and the old Etruscan groves! You have of course visited Italy, if you so well know Sicily?"
"I have done little more than cruise along the coast," replied Captain Delaware; "but in Sicily I was landed, and remained some months for the recovery of my health."
"Oh, the sweet coasts of the Mediterranean Sea!" said Burrel, "where at every league there is some beauty and some memory--some pleasant dream of the present or the past---from the Imperial City and its wolf-suckled founder, to the grey majesty of Pæstum and the Calabrese peasant with his long gun and his Mother Goose hat, caroling his gay ditty as cheerfully as a pickpocket. In every other corner of the world, I feel earth stuffed with stern realities; but in Italy I can fully enter into the feeling of Metastasio, and exclaim, 'Sogno della mia vita e il corso intero!'"
"You are an enthusiast, I see," replied the other with a smile.
"When I am in company with one," answered Burrel laughing. His companion coloured slightly, but good-humouredly, and the conversation went on in the same easy manner in which it had commenced, through the rest of their journey. It is unnecessary to give any farther details thereof; for such light nothings, though very pleasant to while away the hours in a stage-coach, are most excessively tiresome in the small pages of an octavo. Let it suffice that Captain Delaware, surprised and pleased with his companion, found the journey far shorter than he had expected. Indeed, so captivated was he, that in the whole of Burrel's deportment there was but one thing he thought might have been altered to advantage, which was a certain air of taking every thing as a matter of course--a tone of indifference which men of the world acquire they know not well how, and which, in the present instance, blended in an extraordinary manner with the high feeling of the beautiful and the excellent which his conversation breathed throughout.
That tone, however, is not without its advantages also, and the young sailor found that it might be serviceable, when at Hartford Bridge a person of a very different description was intruded upon them. He was a short, broad made man, with long baboonish arms, and a face on which nature had so plainly written the class to which it was to belong, that had fortune in some of her freaks covered it either with the coronet of a peer, or a peasants straw hat, his mother, or fortune, or nature, would have had much to answer for. Some of the features were good, however--the eyes were very tolerable, for instance; and the nose was not bad. But then the cheek-bones!--Good God, such cheek-bones! From Crim Tartary to Banff there is nothing to be seen like them. The mouth, too, was worse--one of those fearful mouths, whose broad, fat, wide-parted, irregular lips, seem to vaticinate the fate of the owner with such distinctness that no person of common foresight can see them without at once picturing the person who possesses them--not as about to be hanged, but as actually hanging. The skin that was over all was of that reddish, coarse, mottled kind, which puts one in mind of a gross strawberry; and although, as before said, the eyes in themselves were goodish blue, meaningless eyes enough, yet the place where there should have grown eyelashes, being alone furnished with a red knotty line in their room, gave them a ferret-like sharpness, without which they would have signified nothing at all.
This Worthy, "passant à joints pieds" as Madame de Sevigné calls it, over all ceremonies, was inclined to make himself so much at his ease, that Captain Delaware--disgusted and offended, yet without any absolute pretext for anger--felt strongly inclined to quarrel with, and eject from the window, a person who interrupted a pleasant conversation to substitute vulgar impertinence in its place. Burrel, on the contrary, with cool indifference, amused himself for a moment or two with the other's vulgarity, and then trode him into silence by contempt. He then calmly resumed the conversation with his first companion, from which there was something in his tone and manner that irresistibly excluded the other, who to revenge himself looked out of the window, and, like my Uncle Toby, whistled lillebullero.
Thus passed the remaining hours of their journey--Burrel every moment increasing upon the esteem of his travelling companion, till at length they approached, about six o'clock, a little village, which, though it may bear a different name in the county map, we shall take the liberty of calling Emberton. The sun had so far declined from the meridian, that the shadows were getting long and blue; but still the sheeny splendour of the summer's day was not at all decreased, though the approach of evening had cleared away the hazy brightness which hangs ever about a very hot and sunny noon. The coach wound on along the road, every now and then passing various objects which gave notice that it was approaching some place where the busy and improving emmets that lord it over this ant-hill world, had congregated together, and adorned their place of sojourn. Now came a neat gate and a detached cottage, too miniature in all its proportions, from the little turkey-carpet garden to the rustic porch, to be the country mansion of any man of large property; and yet too neat, and one might perhaps say too elegant, to be the dwelling of the poor. It was evidently the house of the doctor or the lawyer, or the retired maiden lady of some village near at hand, and it again was succeeded by a long clean whitewashed wall, belonging to garden, or shrubbery, or semi-park, between which and the coach road ran a fair gravel footpath, defended by green posts and iron chains. The manifold paths and roads branching to the right and left, clean and well kept, told the same tale of man's habitation; and in a moment after, winding over a slight rise, the coach reached the brow of the hill from which the whole village or little town of Emberton was visible.
It lay in a country slightly undulating, but backed by some high hills at the distance of about fifteen miles, and between them and the elevation which the coach had reached, the expanse might rather be called a plain than a valley. The village was close beneath the slope, and had little to distinguish it from any other English country town, having all that peculiar air of cleanness, of regularity, and of the spirit of industry and cultivation, which is only to be seen in England. Its greatest ornament was the river, which, clear, smooth, and tranquil, ran through the town very nearly at the middle, and was itself spanned over by a neat stone bridge of about fifty yards in length. That bridge, however, was to be remarked for something more than its light and elegant construction: its balustrade formed the continuation of a low stone wall which separated the village from a wide park on the right hand side, full of majestic trees, scattered in groups of four or five over a fine undulating piece of ground. Through the midst the river flowed gently on, reflecting the evening sky, and two or three swans that floated on its bosom, the clear light of which was only broken here and there by a fall of a few feet, which scarcely increased the flow of the current. As one looked up the park from the bridge--at the distance of about a third of a mile on either hand--might be seen a grove of tall graceful trees, sufficiently extensive to take the appearance of a forest, in some of the glades of which the eye caught occasionally the remains of old summer-houses, in the Charles the Second taste; and in the central point was seen the mansion itself built of mingled gray stone and red brick, with small innumerable windows. It bore the aspect of what it really had been--a monastery erected early in the reign of Henry VIII. by a wealthy community of friars. From them it was afterwards wrested by that pink of reforming monarchs, tyrants, and plunderers, and bestowed upon some minion of the day. The buttery of their time had become the lodge now, and was a detached building in the same fashion as the house, projecting into the high-road, and flanked by two large iron gates, which, to say sooth, were somewhat rusty for the want of paint. In what state of repair the dwelling-house itself was kept, could hardly be discerned at that distance; but no kinds of deer were seen sporting in the park, and sheep had evidently taken their place, as affording probably a more profitable manner of employing the land.