There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the m; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no pany, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so peing, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.
I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the ing home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the sciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Geiana Reed.
The said Eliza, John, and Geiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reed on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time her quarrelling n) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed from joining the group; saying, 「She regretted to be uhe y of keepi a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation, that I was endeav in good earo 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 tented, 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 speak pleasantly, remain silent.」
A breakfast-room adjoihe drawing-room, I slipped in there. It tained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be oored 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, proteg, 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 se of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.
I returo my book—Bewick』s History of British Birds: the letterpress thereof I cared little fenerally speaking; ahere 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 southerremity, the Lindeness, or o the North Cape—
「Where the Northern O, 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, Id, Greenland, with 「the vast sweep of the Arctie, and those forlions of dreary space,—that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of turies of winters, glazed in Alpis above heights, surround the pole, and tre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold.」 Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-prehended n