“A most extraordinary young man,” muttered
the parson, gazing at the receding form of the tall
stranger; then gently shaking his head, he added,
“Quite an original.” He was contented
with that solution of the difficulties which had puzzled
him. May the reader be the same.
AFTER the family dinner, at which the farmer’s
guest displayed more than his usual powers of appetite,
Kenelm followed his host towards the stackyard, and
said,—
“My dear Mr. Saunderson, though you have no
longer any work for me to do, and I ought not to trespass
further on your hospitality, yet if I might stay with
you another day or so, I should be very grateful.”
“My dear lad,” cried the farmer, in whose
estimation Kenelm had risen prodigiously since the
victory over Tom Bowles, “you are welcome to
stay as long as you like, and we shall be all sorry
when you go. Indeed, at all events, you must
stay over Saturday, for you shall go with us to the
squire’s harvest-supper. It will be a pretty
sight, and my girls are already counting on you for
a dance.”
“Saturday,—the day after to-morrow.
You are very kind; but merrymakings are not much in
my way, and I think I shall be on my road before you
set off to the Squire’s supper.”
“Pooh! you shall stay; and, I say, young ’un,
if you want more to do, I have a job for you quite
in your line.”
“What is it?”
“Thrash my ploughman. He has been insolent
this morning, and he is the biggest fellow in the
county, next to Tom Bowles.”
Here the farmer laughed heartily, enjoying his own
joke.
“Thank you for nothing,” said Kenelm,
rubbing his bruises. “A burnt child dreads
the fire.”
The young man wandered alone into the fields.
The day was becoming overcast, and the clouds threatened
rain. The air was exceedingly still; the landscape,
missing the sunshine, wore an aspect of gloomy solitude.
Kenelm came to the banks of the rivulet not far from
the spot on which the farmer had first found him.
There he sat down, and leaned his cheek on his hand,
with eyes fixed on the still and darkened stream lapsing
mournfully away: sorrow entered into his heart
and tinged its musings.
“Is it then true,” said he, soliloquizing,
“that I am born to pass through life utterly
alone; asking, indeed, for no sister-half of myself,
disbelieving its possibility, shrinking from the thought
of it,—half scorning, half pitying those
who sigh for it?—thing unattainable,—better
sigh for the moon!
“Yet if other men sigh for it, why do I stand
apart from them? If the world be a stage, and
all the men and women in it merely players, am I to
be the solitary spectator, with no part in the drama
and no interest in the vicissitudes of its plot?
Many there are, no doubt, who covet as little as I
do the part of ‘Lover,’ ’with a woful
ballad, made to his mistress’s eyebrow;’
