“Faith,” says Ike, “it’s warmer there than here, at any rate; for I’m just come from it.”
Struck by so strange an answer, the mounted sportsman asked the one on foot “How things were going on in those lower regions?”
“Much as usual,” replied Ike, with a sly twinkle in his eye, and a glance at his interrogator, who had lately inherited a large fortune—“much as usual, and terribly crowded about the doorway. The poor all coming out, and _the rich all going in_!”
The wealthy man struck spurs into his horse, and forbore to ask Ike any farther questions.
But Time, which, as the poet tells us, will “rust the keenest blade,” did not fail to leave the marks of his progress upon old Ike. Hard work, hard fare, and the lapse of years eventually disqualified him for such severe exertion as that of following fox-hounds on foot; and the Earl of Castle-Cropper, with that consideration which, under his calm exterior, has always attested the warmth of his heart, gave him the appointment of earth-stopper in his establishment—an office which the old man fills thoroughly _con amore_, and for which his exceedingly active habits, his utter disregard of all conventional hours or customs, and his extraordinary familiarity with the habits of wild animals, render him peculiarly fitted.
It is not often he indulges, as I saw him at the bar-window, in the use of stimulants; but when he does “take a drop of anything, it is always a glass of gin-and-cloves.” In this fragrant compound he invariably drinks the same toast—an old-world sentiment almost forgotten—
“Horses stout, and hounds healthy; Earths well stopped, and foxes plenty!”
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I ALWAYS think convalescence is a more tedious process than actual illness. A man of active habits, who has lived a great deal out-of-doors, pines to be at work in the open air again; and although intellectual pleasures are doubtless very delightful, there is something in the sense of rapid motion, and strong physical exertion, which “leavens the blood” far more effectually than the richest mental food the Bodleian itself can afford. Before I had been confined to the inside of The Haycock for a week, or had digested a tenth of the contents of such new books as I had brought down with me in anticipation of occasional frosts, I had begun to loathe the very sight of the dust-coloured curtains in my bedroom, the staring paper in my sitting apartment, the smell of coffee that pervades the passages of an inn at all hours of the day and night—none the less because that beverage is seldom consumed within its precincts—and the general features of the prison I had chosen of my own accord. Nay, I almost caught myself, on more than one occasion, doubtful of my loyalty to Miss Lushington herself, censorious as to her appearance, sceptical on her excellence, and even insensible to her charms.