pointing downward into the water.  Their decay is so slow that the protection they afford the soft spongy banks against the action of the water, is likely to be prolonged until the gathering and deposit of successive layers of alluvium will remove them from the margin of which they are now most useful supports.  On my return home, I was met by a child (as she seemed to me) carrying a baby, in whose behalf she begged me for some clothes.  On making some enquiry, I was amazed to find that the child was her own:  she said she was married and fourteen years old, she looked much younger even than that, poor creature.  Her mother, who came up while I was talking to her, said she did not herself know the girl’s age;—­how horridly brutish it all did seem, to be sure.

The spring is already here with her hands full of flowers.  I do not know who planted some straggling pyrus japonica near the house, but it is blessing my eyes with a hundred little flame-like buds, which will presently burst into a blaze; there are clumps of narcissus roots sending up sheaves of ivory blossoms, and I actually found a monthly rose in bloom on the sunny side of one of the dykes; what a delight they are in the slovenly desolation of this abode of mine! what a garden one might have on the banks of these dykes, with the least amount of trouble and care!

In the afternoon I rowed over to Darien, and there procuring the most miserable vehicle calling itself a carriage that I had ever seen (the dirtiest and shabbiest London hackney-coach were a chariot of splendour and ease to it), we drove some distance into the sandy wilderness that surrounds the little town, to pay a visit to some of the resident gentry who had called upon us.  The road was a deep wearisome sandy track, stretching wearisomely into the wearisome pine forest—­a species of wilderness more oppressive a thousand times to the senses and imagination than any extent of monotonous prairie, barren steppe, or boundless desert can be; for the horizon there at least invites and detains the eye, suggesting beyond its limit possible change; the lights and shadows and enchanting colours of the sky afford some variety in their movement and change, and the reflections of their tints; while in this hideous and apparently boundless pine barren, you are deprived alike of horizon before you and heaven above you:  nor sun nor star appears through the thick covert, which, in the shabby dinginess of its dark blue-green expanse, looks like a gigantic cotton umbrella stretched immeasurably over you.  It is true that over that sandy soil a dark green cotton umbrella is a very welcome protection from the sun, and when the wind makes music in the tall pine-tops and refreshment in the air beneath them.  The comparison may seem ungrateful enough:  to-day, however, there was neither sound above nor motion below, and the heat was perfectly stifling, as we ploughed our way through the resinous-smelling sand solitudes.