MANURES 87 



— may have averted their divine noses when Cloacina 

 passed, and made ostentatious use of scent-bottle and 

 pocket-handkerchief — Flora, and Pomona, and Ceres 

 would ever admire her virtues, and beseech her benign 

 influence upon the garden, the orchard, and the farm. 

 But the terrestrials never thought that fcex tirbts 

 might be lux orbis, and they polluted their rivers, as 

 we ours, with that which should have fertilised their 

 lands. And we blame the Romans very much indeed ; 

 and we blame everybody else very much indeed; and 

 we do hope the time will soon be here when such a 

 sinful waste will no longer disgrace an enlightened 

 age ; but beyond the contribution of this occasional 

 homily, it is, of course, no affair of ours. Each man 

 assures his neighbour that the process of dessication 

 is quite easy, and the art of deodorising almost nice ; 

 but nobody 'goes in/ The reader, I have no doubt, 

 has with me had large experience of this perversity 

 in neighbours, and ofttimes has been perplexed and 

 pained by their dogged, strange reluctance to follow 

 the very best advice. There was at Cambridge, some 

 thirty years ago, an insolent, foul-mouthed, pugnacious 

 sweep, who escaped for two terms the sublime licking 

 which he * annexed* finally, because no one liked to 

 tackle the soot. There were scores of undergraduates, 

 to whom pugilism was a thing of beauty and a joy for 

 ever, who had the power and the desire to punish his 



