“‘Oh, you do not consider how much we have wound about. We have taken such a very serpentine course, and the wood itself must be half a mile long in a straight line, for we have never seen the end of it yet since we left the first great path.’ “‘But if you remember, before we left that first great path we saw directly to the end of it. We looked down the whole vista, and saw it closed by iron gates, and it could not have been more than a furlong in length.’ “‘Oh, I know nothing of your furlongs, but I am sure it is a very long wood; and that we have been winding in and out ever since we came into it; and therefore when I say that we have walked a mile in it I must speak within compass.’ “‘We have been exactly a quarter of an hour here,’ said Edmund, taking out his watch. ‘Do you think we are walking four miles an hour?’ “‘Oh, do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.’ “A few steps farther brought them out at the bottom of the very walk they had been talking of. “‘Now, Miss Crawford, if you will look up the walk, you will convince yourself that it cannot be half a mile long, or half half a mile.’ “‘It is an immense distance,’ said she; ‘I see that with a glance.’ “He still reasoned with her, but in vain. She would not calculate, she would not compare. She would only smile and assert. The greatest degree of rational consistency could not have been more engaging, and they talked with mutual satisfaction.” It is in “Mansfield Park” and in “Persuasion” that the influence of her two sailor brothers, Francis and Charles, on Jane Austen’s work can be most easily traced. Unlike the majority of writers of all time, from Shakespeare with his “Seacoast of Bohemia” down to the author of a penny dreadful, Jane Austen never touched, even lightly, on a subject unless she had a real knowledge of its details. Her pictures of the life of a country gentleman and of clergymen are accurate, if not always sympathetic. Perhaps it was all too near her own experience to have the charm of romance, but concerning sailors she is romantic. Their very faults are lovable in her eyes, and their lives packed with interest. When Admiral Croft, Captain Wentworth, or William Price appears on the scene, the other characters immediately take on a merely subsidiary interest, and this prominence is always that given by appreciation. The distinction awarded to Mr. Collins or Mrs. Elton, as the chief object of ridicule, is of a different nature. The only instance she cared to give us of a sailor who is not to be admired is Mary Crawford’s uncle, the Admiral, and even he is allowed to earn our esteem by disinterested kindness to William Price.