en he is taking a stolen look out of the
window at Mr. Fearing, who is conducting himself more like a chicken than
a man around the Interpreter's door. And from that moment till Mr.
Fearing shouted "Grace reigns!" as he cleared the last river, never
sportsman surely stalked a startled deer so patiently and so skilfully
and so successfully as Greatheart circumvented that chicken-hearted
pilgrim. "At last I looked out of the window, and perceiving a man to be
up and down about the door, I went out to him and asked him what he was;
but, poor man, the water stood ill his eyes. So I perceived what he
wanted. I went in, therefore, and told it in the house, and we showed
the thing to our Lord. So He sent me out again to entreat him to come
in; but I dare say I had hard work to do it." Greatheart's whole account
of Mr. Fearing always brings the water to my eyes also. It is indeed a
delicious piece of English prose. If I were a professor of _belles
lettres_ instead of what I am, I would compel all my students, under pain
of rustication, to get those three or four classical pages by heart till
they could neither perpetrate nor tolerate bad English any more. This
camp-fire tale, told by an old soldier, about a troublesome young recruit
and all his adventures, touches, surely, the high-water mark of sweet and
undefiled English. Greatheart was not the first soldier who could handle
both the sword and the pen, and he has not been the last. But not Caesar
and not Napier themselves ever handled those two instruments better.

2. Greatheart had just returned to his Master's house from having seen
Mr. Fearing safely through all his troubles and well over the river,
when, behold, another caravan of pilgrims is ready for his convoy. For
Greatheart, you must know, was the Interpreter's armed servant. When at
any time Greatheart was off duty, which in those days was but seldom, he
took up his quarters again in the Interpreter's house. As he says
himself, he came back from the river-side only to look out of the
Interpreter's window to see if there was any more work on the way for him
to do. And, as good luck would have it, as has been said, the guide was
just come back from his adventures with Mr. Fearing when a pilgrim party,
than which he had never seen one more to his mind, was introduced to him
by his Master, the Interpreter. "The Interpreter," so we read at this
point, "then called for a man-servant of his, one Greatheart,