We rode out of London next day.  He started in a fret to be home, but this impatience declined by the way, and by the time we crossed Tamar had sunk to a lethargy.  Sore was I to mark the dull gaze he lifted (by habit) at the corner of the road where Constantine comes into view; and sorer the morning after, when, having put gun into his hand and packed him off with Diana, the old setter, at his heel, I met him an hour later returning dejectedly to the house.  For the next three or four months he went listless as a man dragging a wounded limb.  But since spring brought back rod and angle, I think and pray that the voice of running water (best medicine in Nature) begins to cure him.  He has written the foregoing narrative in a hot fit which, while it lasted, more than once kept his lamp burning till daybreak; and although the last chapter was no sooner finished than he flung the whole away in disgust.  I have hopes of him.  I may even live to see a child running about these silent terraces . . .  But this, my dearest wish, outruns all present indications; and if Prosper ever marries again it will be as his father married, and not for love.[1]

By good fortune I am able to supply the reader with some later news of two members of the expedition, Mr. Fett and Mr. Badcock.  It came to me, early this summer, in the following letter:—­

To Gervase Arundel, Esq., of Constantine in Cornwall, England.

“Venice. 
Ash Wednesday (4.30 a.m.), 1761.

“Excellent Sir,

“I take up my pen, and lay aside the false nose I have been wearing night and day for close on a week, to make a communication which will doubtless interest you as it has profoundly affected me.  It will also interest your nephew and his lady (whose hands I kiss) if they succeeded in effecting their escape to England—­where, failing news of them, I do myself a frequent pleasure to picture them at rest upon the quiet waters of domestic felicity.  But I address myself rather to you, whom (albeit on the briefest acquaintance) I shall ever regard as the personification of stability and mild repose.  Heracleitus and his followers may prate of a world of flux; but there are men to whom the recollections of their fellows ever turn confidently, secure of finding them in the same place; and of such, sir, you are the palmary example among my acquaintance.

“On the circumstances of our retreat from Genoa I need not dilate.  We decamped—­I and my brother artistes—­to Pisa, where, after an unsatisfactory season, we broke up our company by mutual consent and went our various ways in search of fortune.  Mr. Badcock—­by this time a pantaloon of considerable promise and not to be sneezed at in senile parts where affection or natural decay required, or at least excused, a broken accent—­threw in his lot with me:  and we bent our steps together upon this unique city, where for close upon twelve months I have drawn a respectable salary as Director