Our social diversions at Rock Park were interrupted, at about this period, by the whooping-cough, which seized upon all of us together, and I well remember my father almost climbing up the wall of the room in some of his paroxysms; but he treated it all as a joke, and was always ready to laugh as soon as he got through coughing. It left no ill effects except upon my mother, who had bronchial trouble which, as I have intimated, finally led to the breaking-up of our household. She was not made for England. IX Two New England consciences--Inexhaustible faith and energy-- Deep and abiding love of England--"How the Water Comes Down at Lodore"--"He took an' he let go"--Naked mountains--The unsentimental little quadruped--The human element in things sticks--The coasts of England--A string of sleepy donkeys-- Unutterable boy-thoughts--Grins and chuckles like an ogress-- Hideous maternal parody--The adorable inverted bell-glass-- Strange things happen in the world--An ominous clouding of the water--Something the world has never known--Overweening security--An admonition not to climb too high--How vice may become virtue by repetition--Corporal Blair's chest--Black- Bottle Cardigan--Called to Lisbon. Emerson, as a matter of principle, was rather averse from travel, though he made the trip to England twice; but he fortified his theory by his practice of searching out great men rather than historic or picturesque places. Ruskin's Modern Painters had not been written when Emerson first left home, and I doubt if he read it at any time. He found his mountain scenery in Carlyle and his lakes and vales elsewhere among agreeable people. My father's conscience worked in a different way; he thought himself under obligations to see whatever in the way of towns, ruins, cathedrals, and scenery was accounted worthy a foreigner's attention; but I think he would have enjoyed seeing them much more had that feeling of obligation not been imposed upon him. Set sights, as he often remarked, wearied him, just because they were set; things that he happened upon unpremeditatedly, especially if they were not described in guide-books, pleased him more and tired him less. It can hardly be affirmed, however, that he would have missed the set sights if he could have done so, and no doubt he was glad, after the job was done, that he had done it. And he was greatly helped along by the inexhaustible faith and energy in such matters of his wife; she shrank from no enterprise, and seemed always in precisely the right mood to appreciate whatever she beheld. She could go day after day to a picture-gallery, and stay all day long; she would make herself as familiar with churches, castles, and cathedrals as she was with her own house; she would wander interminably and delightedly about old towns and cities, or gaze with never-waning joy upon lakes and mountains, and my father, accompanying her, was, in a