Mrs. G. had a headache, and Caroline was in pursuit of one over the pages of the "Thirty Years' War." Such was the tableau of the Dodd family on this agreeable day. I don't give myself much up to reflection, Bob. I have always thought that as life is a road to be travelled, one step forward is worth any number in the opposite direction; but I vow to you that, on this occasion, I did begin to ponder a little over the past and the present, with a half-glance at the future. What the governor had said the day before was no more than the truth,--we _were_ living at a tremendous rate. If all belonging to us were sold, the capital would scarcely afford six or seven years of such expenditure. These were serious, if not stunning reflections, and I heartily wished they had occupied any other head than my own.
To _you_--who have always given your brains their own share of work--thinking is no labor. It's like a gallop to a horse in hard bunting condition, and only serves to keep him in wind; but to _me_, whose faculties are, so to say, fresh from grass, the fatigue of thought is no trifling infliction. Slow men, I take it, suffer more than your clever fellows on these occasions, since their minds are not suggestive of expedients, and they go on plodding over the same ground, till they make a beaten course in their poor brains, like an old race-ground. Something in this fashion must have occurred to me; for by dint of that dreary morning's rumination, I half made up my mind to emigrate somewhere, and if I did n't exactly know where, the fault lies more in my geography than my spirit of enterprise.
The only book I could lay my hands on likely to give me any information was "Cook's Voyages;" and this, I remembered, was in the governor's room. I at once descended the stairs, and had just reached the little conservatory outside of it, when I caught sight of a woman's dress beneath the thick foliage of the orange-trees. I crept noiselessly onward, and after a very devious series of artful dodges, I detected Mrs. D. playing eavesdropper at the governor's door.
I tried to persuade myself that I was mistaken. I did my best to fancy that she was botanizing or "bouquet" gathering; but no, the stubborn fact would not be denied. There she was, bent down, with ear and eye alternately at the keyhole. Neither the act nor the situation were very dignified, and determining that she should not be detected by any other in this predicament, I kicked down a flower-pot, and, before I had well time to replace it, she was gone.