There was something strangely exasperating, as well as strangely wearying, in these uncommanded evolutions. It is bitter to return to infancy, to be supported, and directed, and perpetually set upon your feet, by the hand of some one else. The air besides, as it is supplied to you by the busy millers on the platform, closes the eustachian tubes and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, till his throat is grown so dry that he can swallow no longer. And for all these reasons--although I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy in my surroundings, and longed, and tried, and always failed, to lay hands on the fish that darted here and there about me, swift as humming-birds--yet I fancy I was rather relieved than otherwise when Bain brought me back to the ladder and signed to me to mount. And there was one more experience before me even then. Of a sudden, my ascending head passed into the trough of a swell. Out of the green, I shot at once into a glory of rosy, almost of sanguine light--the multitudinous seas incarnadined, the heaven above a vault of crimson. And then the glory faded into the hard, ugly daylight of a Caithness autumn, with a low sky, a grey sea, and a whistling wind.
1 Sir Mordred, left in charge of the kingdom during King Arthur's absence oversea, treacherously raised a rebellion and made war on the king when he returned. It was in this war that Arthur presently met his end.
5 The grants to which the Queen refers are the trade-monopolies granted by her, which she now proceeded to abolish.
8 This account of Cleopatra's death (from North's translation of Plutarch's _Life of Antony_) is closely followed by Shakespeare in _Antony and Cleopatra_.
11 The basket of figs contained the asp, from the bite of which Cleopatra died (_Antony and Cleopatra_, act V. scene ii.).
12 _The three first monarchies of the world_: these, according to Ralegh's account of the world's history, are those of Assyria, Egypt, and Persia.
13 _The good advice of Cineas_: when Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, was contemplating the invasion of Italy (B.C. 280) his friend and adviser Cineas asked him what he would do when he was master of the world. 'Pyrrhus, finding his drift, answered pleasantly, that they would live merrily: a thing (as Cineas then told him) that they presently might do without any trouble, if he could be contented with his own' (Ralegh).