Chapter 49

A BOLD ANGLER

As if in vexation at being thwarted by one branch of the family, Cupid began to work harder at the other, among the moors and mountains. Not that either my lady Philippa or gentle Mistress Carnaby fell back into the snares of youth, but rather that youth, contemptuous of age, leaped up, and defied everybody but itself, and cried tush to its own welfare.

For as soon as the trance of snow was gone, and the world, emboldened to behold itself again, smiled up from genial places; and the timid step of peeping spring awoke a sudden flutter in the breast of buds; and streams (having sent their broken anger to the sea) were pleased to be murmuring clearly again, and enjoyed their own flexibility; and even stern mountains and menacing crags allowed soft light to play with them--at such a time prudence found very narrow house-room in the breast of young Lancelot, otherwise "Pet."

"If Prudence be present, no Divinity is absent," according to high authority; but the author of the proverb must have first excluded Love from the list of Divinities. Pet's breast, or at any rate his chest, had grown under the expansive enormity of love; his liver, moreover (which, according to poets, both Latin and Greek, is the especial throne of love), had quickened its proceedings, from the exercise he took; from the same cause, his calves increased so largely that even Jordas could not pull the agate buttons of his gaiters through their holes. In a word, he gained flesh, muscle, bone, and digestion, and other great bodily blessings, from the power believed by the poets to upset and annihilate every one of them. However, this proves nothing anti-poetical, for the essence of that youth was to contradict experience.

Jordas had never, in all his born days, not even in the thick of the snow-drift, found himself more in a puzzle than now; and he could not even fly for advice in this matter to Lawyer Jellicorse. The first great gift of nature, expelled by education, is gratitude. A child is full of gratitude, or at least has got the room for it; but no full-grown mortal, after good education, has been known to keep the rudiments of thankfulness. But Jordas had a stock of it--as much as can remain to any one superior to the making of a cross.

Now the difficulty of it was that Jordas called to mind, every morning when he saw snow, and afterward when he saw anything white, that he must have required a grave, and not got it (in time to be any good to him), without the hard labor, strong endurance, and brotherly tendance of the people of the gill. Even the three grand fairy gifts of Lawyer Jellicorse himself might scarcely have saved him, although they were no less than as follows, in virtue: the tip of a tongue that had never told a lie (because it belonged to a bullock slain young), a flask of old Scotch whiskey, and a horn comfit-box of Irish snuff. All these three had stood him in good stead,