e-pocket. He was generally invisible. Temple did not think it
strange that we should be riding out in an unknown world with only a
little ring, half a stone's-throw clear around us, and blots of
copse, and queer vanishing cottages, and hard grey meadows, fir-trees
wonderfully magnified, and larches and birches rigged like fairy ships,
all starting up to us as we passed, and melting instantly. One could
have fancied the fir-trees black torches. And here the shoulder of
a hill invited us to race up to the ridge: some way on we came to
crossroads, careless of our luck in hitting the right one: yonder hung a
village church in the air, and church-steeple piercing ever so high;
and out of the heart of the mist leaped a brook, and to hear it at one
moment, and then to have the sharp freezing silence in one's ear,
was piercingly weird. It all tossed the mind in my head like hay on
a pitchfork. I forgot the existence of everything but what I loved
passionately,--and that had no shape, was like a wind.

Up on a knoll of firs in the middle of a heath, glowing rosy in the
frost, we dismounted to lunch, leaning against the warm saddles, Temple
and I, and Uberly, our groom, who reminded me of a certain tramp of my
acquaintance in his decided preference of beer to champagne; he drank,
though, and sparkled after his draught. No sooner were we on horseback
again--ere the flanks of the dear friendly brutes were in any way
cool--than Temple shouted enthusiastically, 'Richie, we shall do it yet!
I've been funking, but now I'm sure we shall do it. Janet said, "What's
the use of my coming over to dine at Riversley if Harry Richmond and you
don't come home before ten or eleven o'clock?" I told her we'd do it
by dinner-time: Don't you like Janet, Richie?--That is, if our
horses' hic-haec-hocks didn't get strained on this hard
nominative-plural-masculine of the article road. Don't you fancy
yourself dining with the captain, Richie? Dative huic, says old Squire
Gregory. I like to see him at dinner, because he loves the smell of
his wine. Oh! it's nothing to boast of, but we did drink them under
the table, it can't be denied. Janet heard of it. Hulloa! you talk of a
hunting-knife. What do you say to a pair of skates? Here we are in for a
frost of six weeks. It strikes me, a pair of skates...'

This was the champagne in Temple. In me it did not bubble to speech,
and I soon drew him on at a pace that rendered conversation impossible.
Uberly shoute