of Bull is one of those offices which the simple starveling
piper regards with afresh access of appetite for the well-picked bone of
his virtue. That ghastly apparition of the fleshly present is revealed
to him as a dead whale, having the harpoon of the inevitable slayer of
the merely fleshly in his oils. To humour him, and be his piper for his
gifts, is to descend to a carnival deep underneath. While he reigns,
thinks this poor starveling, Rome burns, or the explosive powders are
being secretly laid. He and his thousand Macheaths are dancing the
country the giddy pace, and there will, the wretch dreads, be many
a crater of scoria in the island, before he stretches his inanimate
length, his parasites upon him. The theme is chosen and must be treated
as a piper involved in his virtue conceives it: that is, realistically;
not with Bull's notion of the realism of the butcher's shop and the
pendent legs of mutton and blocks of beef painted raw and glaring
in their streaks, but with the realism of the active brain and heart
conjoined. The reasons for the division of Celt and Saxon, what they
think and say of one another, often without knowing that they are
divided, and the wherefore of our abusing of ourselves, brave England,
our England of the ancient fortitude and the future incarnation,
can afford to hear. Why not in a tale? It is he, your all for animal
pleasure in the holiday he devours and cannot enjoy, whose example
teaches you to shun the plaguey tale that carries fright: and so you
find him sour at business and sick of his relaxings, hating both because
he harnesses himself in turn bestially to each, growling at the smallest
admixture of them, when, if he would but chirp a little over his work,
and allow his pleasures to inspire a dose of thoughtfulness, he would
be happier, and--who knows?-become a brighter fellow, one to be rescued
from the pole-axe.

Now the rain is over, your carriage is at the door, the country smiles
and the wet highway waves a beckoning hand. We have worn through a
cloud with cloudy discourses, but we are in a land of shifting weathers,
'coelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis foedum,' not every chapter can be
sunshine.

CHAPTER XVII. CROSSING THE RUBICON

Rough weather on the Irish sea discharged a pallid file of passengers
from the boat at Holyhead just as the morning sun struck wave
and mountain with one of the sudden sparkling changes which our
South-welters have in their folds to tel