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"Do his own sympathies in any way make it intelli-gible to him ? If so, it may prove that he is the very reader I wish for ; but, before lie decides as to how far he really agrees with me, there is an important part of my meaning which it still remains for me to explain to him. It perhaps may have struck him that what I have said about the charm of newness is capable of being applied to the newness of a new country—to a clearing with its log houses in some colonial forest, or to the white stores and the printing office of an infant Higgsville or Briggsville, appearing like pustules on the face of an expressionless prairie. I must therefore tell him that in my mind it has no such application whatever ; that the newness which I speak of is a very limited thing ; that it is essenti-ally connected with the past, and essentially opposed to the present ; in fact, that for me the only new world is the old. Nor is this limitation arbitrary. There is a very excellent reason for it. The present, with all its mortal coil of weariness—that is to say, our natural and habitual surroundings—is the very thing which a traveller, as I have tried to describe him, travels on purpose to shuffle off. JSTow the present, for us in England, what is it ? It is a modern order of things, gradually effacing and defacing a tradi-tional : still the traditional order is not yet quite obliterated. But in a new country there is no tradi-tional order at all; and life there for the traveller, instead of being any escape from the present, would be simply the present itself in a balder and more t IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

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