him to a headlong plunge and swim of the amorous mind, occupying
a minute, filling an era. He corrected the feebleness, and at the same
time threw a practical coachman's glance on peculiarities of the road,
requiring some knowledge of it if traversed backward at a whipping pace
on a moonless night. The drive from Canleys to the Royal Sovereign could
be done by good pacers in an hour and a half, little more--with Ives and
the stables ready, and some astonishment in a certain unseen chamber.
Fleetwood chuckled at a vision of romantic devilry--perfectly legitimate
too. Something, more to inflict than enjoy, was due to him.

He did, not phrase it, that a talk with the fellow Woodseer of his
mountains and his forests, and nature, philosophy, poetry, would have
been particularly healthy for him, almost as good as the good counsel
be needed and solicited none to give him. It swept among his ruminations
while he pricked Potts and Mallard to supply his craving for satanical
fare.

Gower Woodseer; the mention of whom is a dejection to the venerable
source of our story, was then in the act of emerging from the Eastward
into the Southward of the line of Canterbury's pilgrims when they set
forth to worship, on his homeward course, after a walk of two days
out of Dover. He descended London's borough, having exactly twopence
halfpenny for refreshment; following a term of prudent starvation, at
the end of the walk. It is not a district seductive to the wayfarer's
appetite; as, for example, one may find the Jew's fry of fish in oil,
inspiriting the Shoreditch region, to be. Nourishment is afforded,
according to the laws of England's genius in the arts of refection, at
uninviting shops, to the necessitated stomach. A penn'orth of crumb of
bread, assisted on its laborious passage by a penn'orth of the rinsings
of beer, left the natural philosopher a ha'penny for dessert at the
stall of an applewoman, where he withstood an inclination toward the
juicy fruit and chose nuts. They extend a meal, as a grimace broadens
the countenance, illusorily; but they help to cheat an emptiness in
time, where it is nearly as offensive to our sensations as within us;
and that prolonged occupation of the jaws goes a length to persuade
us we are filling. All the better when the substance is indigestible.
Tramps of the philosophical order, who are the practically sagacious,
prefer tough grain for the teeth. Woodseer's munching of his nuts
awakened to fond ima