It was to this idyllic retreat that our Tityrus or Corydon repaired to essay his metallic pipe. And, standing on the bank like a watchman, his horn to his lips, “Tucker, tucker,” he breathed industriously into the unresponsive instrument. In vain did he lip and tongue the notes as instructed, nothing broke the sultry silence. Surely the mouthpiece could _not_ suit Mr. William Flynt’s lips. Suddenly, in his shamed impotence, he had a sense of a breathing presence. In his agitation the horn slipped from his nervous fingers and went souse into the water, while the startled beast—for the observer proved to be only one of Master Peartree’s cows—lumbered bouncingly back along the pasture.
Fortunately the instrument had lodged in the shallow mud of the bank. Fishing it up—it was his sole catch that week—he found to his joy that it emitted a faint toot, and he rightly divined that a little water was just what it had needed. Encouraged by this intervention of Providence in his favour, his performance bore henceforwards some proportion to his pains.
It was embarrassing though to return from these painful puffings without a single bite. Every dinner-time he had to sneak in as best he could with empty basket after a morning of pertinacious tooting, successful enough to frighten off the deafest fish. Once, indeed, going home by a somewhat roundabout route that skirted Blackwater Hall, he chanced on a Chipstone fishmonger serving Long Bradmarsh, and was able to take home some fruits of his rod. But the only time our piscatorial swain ever tried for an honest bite was when he saw or heard somebody or something coming along. Then, drawing in his horn like a snail, he presented the picture of the complete angler. Usually it was only Bidlake’s barge that disturbed his strenuous solitude, and the transient mockery of the twins was for the futile fisher, not for the unsuspected musician. Not even Master Peartree’s cows ever munched their way again to the bank while the horn was at its fell exercises, for, like the horn which the fairy Logistilla presented to Astolpho in “Orlando Furioso,” its blast seemed to put all creation to flight. His sole auditors were a pair of swans who refused to quit their normal haunt, though they hissed him fiercely. Possibly they were accustomed “to hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn,” and so had a standard of musical taste. Is not the swan’s own song, too, celebrated, though it appears only to perform before it dies, as if to evade criticism?