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of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical
inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.

The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round
their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the
fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time neither
quarrelling nor crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had
dispensed from joining the group; saying, "She regretted to be
under the necessity of keeping me at a distance; but that until
she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation,
that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable
and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner
-- something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were -- she
really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented,
happy, little children."

"What does Bessie say I have done?" I asked.

"Jane, I don't like cavillers or questioners; besides, there is
something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that
manner. Be seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly,
remain silent."

A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there. It
contained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking
care that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into
the window-seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like
a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I
was shrined in double retirement.

Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the
left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating
me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over
the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon.
Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of
wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away
wildly before a long and lamentable blast.

I returned to my book -- Bewick's History of British Birds: the
letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and
yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I
could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of
the haunts of sea-fowl; of "the solitary rocks and promontories"
by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles
from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape -


"Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides."


Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of
Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland,
with "the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions
of dreary space, -- that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm
fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed
in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre

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