enie who might press them on us,
and the wisest thing we could do would be to lock them up in a drawer
out of the reach of the servants. Suppose that we wished to walk from
Clovenford to Innerleithen--why, with seven-league boots on, one single
step would take us up to Posso, seven miles above Peebles! That would
never do. By mincing one's steps, indeed, one might contrive to stop at
Innerleithen; but suppose a gad-fly were to sting one's hip at the
Pirn--one unintentional stride would deposit Christopher at Drummelzier,
and another over the Cruik, and far away down Annan water! Therefore,
there is nothing like wings. On wings you can flutter--and glide--and
float and soar--now like a humming-bird among the flowers--now like a
swan, half rowing, half sailing, and half flying adown a river--now like
an eagle afloat in the blue ocean of heaven, or shooting sunwards,
invisible in excess of light--and bidding farewell to earth and its
humble shadows. "O that I had the wings of a dove, that I might flee
away and be at rest!" Who hath not, in some heavy hour or other, from
the depth of his very soul, devoutly--passionately--hopelessly--breathed
that wish to escape beyond the limits of woe and sin--not into the world
of dreamless death; for weary though the immortal pilgrim may have been,
never desired he the doom of annihilation, untroubled although it be,
shorn of all the attributes of being--but he has prayed for the wings of
the dove, because that fair creature, as she wheeled herself away from
the sight of human dwellings, has seemed to disappear to his imagination
among old glimmering forests, wherein she foldeth her wing and falleth
gladly asleep--and therefore, in those agitated times when the spirits
of men acknowledge kindred with the inferior creatures, and would fain
interchange with them powers and qualities, they are willing even to lay
down their intelligence, their reason, their conscience itself, so that
they could but be blessed with the faculty of escaping from all the
agonies that intelligence, and reason, and conscience alone can know,
and beyond the reach of this world's horizon to flee away and be at
rest!

Puck says he will put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.
At what rate is that per second, taking the circumference of the earth
at 27,000 miles, more or less? There is a question for the mechanics,
somewhat about as difficult of solution as Lord Brougham's celebrated
one of the Smuggler