a blind man mystified by his sense of touch at wrong corners. His
bewilderment and speechlessness were a comic display, tragic to him.

Just as his uncle Everard predicted, he came home from his first voyage
a pleasant sailor lad. His features, more than handsome to a woman, so
mobile they were, shone of sea and spirit, the chance lights of the sea,
and the spirit breathing out of it. As to war and bloodshed, a man's
first thought must be his country, young Jacket remarked, and 'Ich dien'
was the best motto afloat. Rosamund noticed the peculiarity of the books
he selected for his private reading. They were not boys' books, books of
adventure and the like. His favourite author was one writing of Heroes,
in (so she esteemed it) a style resembling either early architecture or
utter dilapidation, so loose and rough it seemed; a wind-in-the-orchard
style, that tumbled down here and there an appreciable fruit with uncouth
bluster; sentences without commencements running to abrupt endings and
smoke, like waves against a sea-wall, learned dictionary words giving a
hand to street-slang, and accents falling on them haphazard, like slant
rays from driving clouds; all the pages in a breeze, the whole book
producing a kind of electrical agitation in the mind and the joints.
This was its effect on the lady. To her the incomprehensible was the
abominable, for she had our country's high critical feeling; but he,
while admitting that he could not quite master it, liked it. He had dug
the book out of a bookseller's shop in Malta, captivated by its title,
and had, since the day of his purchase, gone at it again and again,
getting nibbles of golden meaning by instalments, as with a solitary pick
in a very dark mine, until the illumination of an idea struck him that
there was a great deal more in the book than there was in himself. This
was sufficient to secure the devoted attachment of young Mr. Beauchamp.
Rosamund sighed with apprehension to think of his unlikeness to boys and
men among his countrymen in some things. Why should he hug a book he