“By my soul, I could fancy the lady earth wore this veil to conceal fast gathering tears, rather than smiles or blushes! _Anglicé_, I think we shall have rain soon—though blistered be my tongue for saying it!—not about the rain but about the veil! For, look you! Fret as I may at this journey through the mist—yet this fine scenery, under a cloud as it literally _is_, gives me a feeling of breadth, grandeur! I expand, spread out over the vast area of its shrouded solitudes. Oh! it is only on the boundless sea or on the mountain top, with a hemisphere below me, that I feel as if I had room enough to live in! And you give me a feeling of suffocation by drawing in this awful shrouded world to the simile of a lady’s veiled face! But it is not to be wondered at! No, by the shade of Marc Antony, and all other great men, who held the whole world light in the balance with a woman’s evanescent smile or tear! everything is _apropos du femmes_ with you now. Could the music of the spheres suddenly burst upon your astonished ears, as soon as you had recovered your senses, your highest note of admiration would be to compare that universal diapason of divine harmony to Lady Carolyn’s silver laugh!” “I do not recollect ever to have heard ‘Lady’ Carolyn laugh.” “_Ten thousand pardons!_ A Clifton of Clifton never laughs. But tell me, Captain, whereabouts in the world—I mean in the clouds, _are we_? And when shall we see this pure pearl of beauty and the rich casket that enshrines her, this stately lily of the mountains and the parterre where she blooms;—when shall we behold Paradise and the Peri—Clifton and Lady Carolyn?” Without replying to this mock-poetic strain, Captain Clifton remained with his eyes still wandering from East to West, and back again over the rolling vapor. And Fairfax continued— “I suspect now, by your abstracted air and wandering eye, that you have lost your way in the clouds—not the first time such a thing has happened to a lover, nor would it be strange in a place like this, where the only land-marks are mountain tops sticking out of the fog with a day’s journey between each!” At this instant a distant group of peaks broke suddenly through the mist like new isles thrown up by the sea, and glittered whitely in the sunlight against the deep blue horizon. “See!” exclaimed Clifton, roused from his apathy by the sudden apparition. “Look, Fairfax! I will show you White Cliffs! Look straight before you to the Western horizon—a little North of West. You see a crescent of seven peaks rising through the mist against the sky. That is White Cliffs.” “Looking white enough at this distance—quite like snow-capped mountains, in fact.” “Yes. They are of white quartz, and their peaks rising from the girdle of dark evergreens around their base and sides, have quite a cooling effect in hot weather.” “Ah! just so. Now how far off are those same blessed refrigerators?”