But for the tugging anxiety as to the journeys end, the
journey itself must thus have counted for the best of
holidays. My physical wellbeing was over-proof;
effects of sea and sky kept me for ever busy with my
pencil; and I had no lack of intellectual exercise of a
different order in the study of my inconsistent friend,
the captain. I call him friend, here on the threshold;
but that is to look well ahead. At first I was too
much horrified by what I considered his barbarities,
too much puzzled by his shifting humours, and too
frequently annoyed by his small vanities, to regard him
otherwise than as the cross of my existence. It was
only by degrees, in his rare hours of pleasantness,
when he forgot (and made me forget) the weaknesses to
which he was so prone, that he won me to a kind of
unconsenting fondness. Lastly, the faults were all
embraced in a more generous view; I saw them in their
place, like discords in a musical progression; and
accepted them and found them picturesque, as we accept
and admire, in the habitable face of nature, the smoky
head of the volcano or the pernicious thicket of the
swamp.
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