and Juliet,” and our masquerade scene was in the height of the modern fashion, for there was literally not room to stir; and what between my nurse and my father I suffered very nearly total eclipse, besides much danger of being knocked down each time either of them moved.  In the balcony, besides me, there was a cloud, which occasionally interfered with my hair, and I think must have made my face appear to the audience like a chin and mouth speaking out of the sky.  To be sure, this inconvenient scenic decoration made rather more appropriate the lines which Shakespeare wrote (only unfortunately Romeo never speaks them), “Two of the stars,” etc.  I acted very well, but was so dreadfully tired at the end of the play that they were obliged to carry me up to my dressing-room, where I all but fainted away; in spite of which, as I got out of the carriage at the door of our lodging, hearing the dear voice of the sea calling me, I tried to persuade Dall to come down to it with me; but she, thinking I had had enough of emotion and exertion, made me go in and eat my supper and go to bed, which was detestable on her part, and so I told her, which she didn’t mind in the least.

Thursday, August 11th.—­A kind and courteous and most courtly old Mr. M——­ called upon us, to entreat that we would dine with him during our stay in Weymouth; but it is really impossible, with all our hard work, to do society duty too, so I begged permission to decline.  After he was gone we walked down to the pier, and took boat and rowed to Portland.  The sky was cloudless, and the sea without a wave, and through its dark-blue transparent roofing we saw clearly the bottom, one forest of soft, undulating weeds, which, catching the sunlight through the crystal-clear water, looked like golden woods of some enchanted world within its depths; and it looks just as weird and lovely when folks go drowning down there, only they don’t see it.  I sang Mrs. Hemans’s “What hid’st thou in thy treasure-caves and cells?” and sang and sang till, after rowing for an hour over the hardly heaving, smooth surface, we reached the foot of the barren stone called Portland.  We landed, and Dall remained on the beach while my father and I toiled up the steep ascent.  The sun’s rays fell perpendicularly on our heads, the short, close grass which clothed the burning, stony soil was as slippery as glass with the heat, and I have seldom had a harder piece of exercise than climbing that rock, from the summit of which one wide expanse of dazzling water and glaring white cliffs, that scorched one’s eyeballs, was all we had for our reward.  To be sure, exertion is a pleasure in itself, and when one’s strength serves one’s courage, the greater the exertion the greater the pleasure.  We saw below us a railroad cut in the rock to convey the huge masses of stone from the famous quarries down to the shore.  The descent looked almost vertical, and we watched two immense loads go slowly down by means of a huge cylinder