them, but there was after all not one that I preferred to my cousin. My
old dreams and romances about love, common to every young fellow, had
all faded into a very commonplace, everyday vision of having a
comfortable house of my own, and a wife as good as most other men's
wives. Just in the same way, my ambitious plans of rising to the very
top of the tree in my profession had dwindled down to satisfaction with
the very limited practice of one of our island doctors. I found myself
chained to this rock in the sea; all my future life would probably be
spent there; and Fate offered me Julia as the companion fittest for me.
I was contented with my fate, and laughed off my boyish fancy that I
ought to be ready to barter the world for love.

Added to these two strong ties keeping me in Guernsey, there were the
hundred, the thousand small associations which made that island, and my
people living upon it, dearer than any other place, or any other people,
in the world. Taking the strength of the rope which held me to the
pier-head as represented by one hundred, then my love for my mother
would stand at sixty-six and a half, my engagement to Julia at about
twenty and the remainder may go toward my old associations. That is
pretty nearly the sum of it.

My engagement to Julia came about so easily and naturally that, as I
said, I was perfectly contented with it. We had been engaged since the
previous Christmas, and were to be married in the early summer, as soon
as a trip through Switzerland would be agreeable. We were to set up
housekeeping for ourselves; that was a point Julia was bent upon. A
suitable house had fallen vacant in one of the higher streets of St.
Peter-Port, which commanded a noble view of the sea and the surrounding
islands. We had taken it, though it was farther from the Grange and my
mother than I should have chosen my home to be. She and Julia were busy,