way we got forward, she was always cheerful, never complaining of bad fare, bad inns, or anything else. . . ."
It was a short excursion, but was memorialised in the usual way by Dorothy's ever ready pen.
XI
In the following year, 1823, Wordsworth and his wife left Lee Priory, "for a little tour in Flanders and Holland," as he phrased it in a letter to John Kenyon. He wrote 16th May:—
"We shall go to Dover, with a view to embark for Ostend to-morrow, unless detained by similar obstacles. From Ostend we mean to go to Ghent, to Antwerp, Breda, Utrecht, Amsterdam—to Rotterdam by Haarlem, the Hague, and Leyden—thence to Antwerp by another route, and perhaps shall return by Mechlin, Brussels, Lille, and Ypres to Calais—or direct to Ostend as we came. We hope to be landed in England within a month. We shall hurry through London homewards, where we are naturally anxious already to be, having left Rydal Mount so far back as February. . . ."
The extracts taken from Mary Wordsworth's Journal show how far they conformed to, and how far they departed from, their original plan of travel. In them will be found the same directness and simplicity, the same vividness of touch, as are seen in her Journal of the longer tour taken in 1820.
XII
In 1828, Dorothy Wordsworth went to the Isle of Man, accompanied by Mrs. Wordsworth's sister Joanna,
