Mr. Drummond spent so much time on the water that he was described by his wife as having webbed feet. There was nothing which gave Mr. Drummond more pleasure than shewing his friends (particularly the ladies) the principal sights of the Solent, describing their history, and attending to their raptures in response. In his earlier years, he had been quite the buck, and was much admired. Now, he was a ruddy-faced, smiling, gentle man who passed his good days on-board his handsome yacht, but when the weather was so disagreeable as to prohibit his favourite activity, he staid within, writing books about the sea and the Solent. His lady wife was a great gardener, to the extent that the Cadland estate produced a bounty of beauty and plenty throughout the year; yet her attentions to the flora of the estate were never so pressing that she would forego a sea-voyage with her husband. Throughout their married life, they had been so many places and staid so long at-sea, that her own foot-prints must have long ago assumed a similar outline.

Dinner at Cadland House was always a gay affair, with long tales of the sea, and the foreign places the Drummonds had visited. After several attempts to steer the conversation landwards to the Cadland farms, Mr. Darcy was forced to abandon his efforts at the tiller and climb aboard with the rest of the party, seeking the answers to his questions of the steward on the following day; Mr. Drummond was experimenting with the small, hardy cattle of the Scottish Highlands to see how they would fare on the meagre, salty marshes along the Solent. Mr. Darcy was interested in their progress, as he had been thinking along the same lines; although there were no salt-marshes in Derbyshire, there was certainly a dearth of good grass, very thinly and irregularly interspersed amidst a bounty of rock. The cattle were hardy indeed, the steward had related, but also very wild. Used to the great mountains and glens of Scotland, the animals had not been content within the confines of the enclosures, were proving a difficulty to keep in, and a near-impossibility to find and recapture once they had obtained their freedom. However, if they could be caught up, they were very fine eating. Mr. Darcy was grateful for the information, which gave him some reason to revisit his own ideas.

The Darcys elected to return to Derbyshire through the expedient of a detour to the west, viewing the great cathedral at Salisbury and the stone-henge near-by. Mr. Darcy asked his wife which she considered the greater accomplishment, the movement of the great stones—which had apparently come from as far away as Wales—or the building of the great Cathedral. Elizabeth replied,