164: CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. 



laughing-stock. Fourteen times out of fifteen, if is 

 said, she makes him play the fool. He is like an 

 old Pointer always making a dead set at a dead 

 scent, or at nothing; a disap-pointer, indicating 

 that which was and is no longer. 



Is it a vice or a virtue? It does not come for 

 nothing. It has its meaning. It is not sent " pro- 

 miscuous-like " to worry and perplex " us fools of 

 Nature," for no object or intent. In her trickiest 

 and wildest and most fantastic frolics, Nature is 

 full of soul, full of deepest, and aye ! of most loving 

 purpose, manward. Under hotter skies, where the 

 flesh of beasts is not so much a food as an un- 

 healthy stimulant to the blood, and where the cool, 

 vegetable and farinaceous diet are all that man's 

 strength or warmth or appetite requires, " cats and 

 dogs" indeed do sometimes come rattling down for 

 days together ; but they come in a pack, full cry : 

 or in equally expressive Indian phrase, it pours 

 " monkeys with their mouths open " when it pours 

 at all. But the gentle English sky alone "rains 

 Turnips : " and English Legs o' mutton, and " Eng- 

 lish Roast-beef," were assuredly concealed behind the 

 vail of centuries, when the first daring mariner, as 

 old Herodotus tells us, was scared back by the " Fog 

 and falling feathers " from the sacred coast of 



