300 PRÆTERITA-II

stay, or he could do nothing for me. I thought this did look a little like quackery, and accordingly made my bow, and proceeded on my journey into Wales, after writing a full account of the interview to my father.¹

60. At Pont-y-Monach lay for me a letter from him, bidding me go back to Leamington at once, and place myself under Jephson’s care. Richard therefore went on to Snowdon by himself; and I, returning with what speed the mail could make, presented myself to the doctor penitently. He sent me into tiny lodgings near the Wells, where I spent six weeks of life extremely new to me; much grumbled at in my diary,-not unpleasant, now remembered.

Salt water from the Wells in the morning, and iron, visibly glittering in deposit at bottom of glass, twice a day. Breakfast at eight, with herb tea-dandelion, I think; dinner at one, supper at six, both of meat, bread, and water, only;-fish, meat, or fowl, as I chose, but only one dish of the meat chosen, and no vegetables nor fruit. Walk, forenoon and afternoon, and early to bed. Such the regimen suddenly enforced on my luxurious life.

To which discipline I submitted accurately: and found life still worth having on these terms, and the renewed hope of its continuance, extremely interesting.

61. Nor wanting in interest, the grotesquely prosaic position itself. Here I was, in a small square brick lodging-house, number what you like of its row, looking out on a bit of suburban paddock, and a broken paling; mean litter everywhere about; the muddy lingering of Leam, about three yards broad, at the other side of the paddock; a ragged brambly bank at the other side of it. Down the row, beginnings of poor people’s shops, then an aristocratic grocer and mercer or two, the circulating library, and the Pump Room.

After the Bay of Naples, Mount Aventine, and St.

¹ [For an additional passage which followed here in the MS., see the Appendix; below, p. 620.]

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