Even all this is only the ocean as referred to man.  How much more magnificent is it in itself!  Thrice the magnitude of the land, the world of waters! its depth unfathomable, its mountains loftier than the loftiest of the land, its valleys more profound, the pinnacles of its hills islands!  What immense shapes of animal and vegetable life may fill those boundless pastures and plains on which man shall never look!  What herds, by thousands and millions, of those mighty creatures whose skeletons we discover, from time to time, in the wreck of the antediluvian globe!  What secrets of form and power, of capacity and enjoyment, may exist under the cover of that mighty expanse of waves which fills the bed of the ocean, and spreads round the globe!

While those and similar ramblings were passing through my mind, as I sat gazing on the bright and beautiful expanse before me, I was aroused by a step on the shingle.  I turned, and saw the gallant guardsman, who had so much interested our party on the night before.  But he received my salutation with a gravity which instantly put an end to my good-humour; and I waited for the denouement, at his pleasure.  He produced a small billet from his pocket, which I opened, and which, on glancing my eye over it, appeared to me a complete rhapsody.  I begged of him to read it, and indulge me with an explanation.  He read it, and smiled.

“It is, I own, not perfectly intelligible,” said he; “but some allowance must be made for a man deeply injured, and inflamed by a sense of wrong.”

I read the signature—­Lafontaine, Capitaine des Chasseurs legers.  I had never heard the name before.  I begged to know “the nature of his business with me, as it was altogether beyond my conjecture.”

“It is perfectly probable, sir,” was the reply; “for I understand that you had never seen each other till last night, at the house of your friend.  The case is simply this:—­Lafontaine, who is one of the finest fellows breathing, has been for some time deeply smitten by the various charms of your host’s very pretty daughter, and, so far as I comprehend, the lady has acknowledged his merits.  But your arrival here has a good deal deranged the matter.  He conceives your attentions to his fair one to be of so marked a nature, that it is impossible for him to overlook them.”

I laughed, and answered,

“Sir, you may make your friend quite at his ease on the subject, for I have not known her existence till within these twenty-four hours.”

“You danced with her half the evening—­you sat beside her at supper.  She listened to you with evident attention—­of this last I myself was witness; and the report in the neighbourhood is, that you have come to this place by an express arrangement with her father,” gravely retorted the guardsman.

All this exactness of requisition appeared to me to be going rather too far; and I exhibited my feeling on the subject, in the tone in which I replied, that I had stated every thing that was necessary for the satisfaction of a “man of sense, but that I had neither the faculty nor the inclination to indulge the captiousness of any man.”