FOOTNOTES:
[3] "There are so many of your countrymen there."—"There are still more of them in England."
[4] "Why do they run away from me? I do not do the same thing twice over."
[5] "The English do whatever they have a mind to: a journey of three hundred leagues for a visit of a fortnight!"
[6] As for us, nothing is required of us but that we should work.
CHAP. II.
On the 23d of April, which the English now know to be the feast of St. George, though, before the accession of King George IV. who observes that day as his birth-day, few of them knew the name of their patron or the day of his feast; "such honour have the saints" in England;—on that day, in the year 1818, I arrived with my two sons at Southampton, on the shore of that sea, which on the morrow was to separate me from my native country.
The son of the captain (for by courtesy he is called captain,) of the Chesterfield packet came to us at the Dolphin Inn, and informed us that the tide would serve at two o'clock the next afternoon. We had hastened through rain and darkness, during the last stage, with a grumbling postilion; for, though we knew the day, we knew not the hour of embarkation. The time we had to spare we might have passed more agreeably at Winchester. Southampton, a very pretty town, is so regularly built, that we had time more than enough to see it, and not enough to go to enjoy the beautiful view from the heights which command the bay, the channel between Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, and the isle itself. All this, however, we saw from the deck of our vessel, more advantageously than in what is called a bird's-eye view, which is only useful when necessary for peeping into the inside of amphitheatres, and the hollows of ravines and craters.