204 AUGUST ON THE MOORS 



chimney, dissipating itself deliberately in dissolving 

 rings in the flickering, stirless air, appeals at once to 

 the poetry and prose of your nature, and with blessed 

 assurance of dinner calms the jaded appetite that is 

 ravening like a famished bear after the dulling influences 

 of the London season. 



See the place that evening when the pleasant memo- 

 ries of many a past season came crowding round you 

 memories from which time has evaporated the bitter, 

 and only left the sweet as you issue forth, cigar in 

 mouth, when a temperate measure of claret has washed 

 down your mountain mutton temperate, that is, for 

 the high latitude you are landed in, for circumstances 

 alter cases, and the frugal hermit of the Tartar steppes 

 or the Highland hills might be the glutton and 

 drunkard of a club in Pall Mall. After all, the 

 pleasure of the evening, profoundly all-pervading as 

 it is, is more than anything else the anticipation of 

 the coming morning. If only the mounting glass do 

 not belie its promise ; if only the weather-sage keeper 

 or the hoary shepherd have not said what they know 

 will please, to rise convicted in the morning as lying 

 oracles. Not likely, or those gorgeous clouds that are 

 fading into gloom on the mountain seaboard of the 

 Atlantic must be liars too ; and as for the martens, 

 if there is any truth in omens drawn from the flight ot 

 birds, the morrow will be a day to mark with a white 

 stone in the weather calendar. 



