It has often been said that real wit is a thing of the past. Certainly the younger generation’s idea of pleasantry is a kind of rough-and-tumble fight as compared to the neat, delicate thrust-play of an older world. But this friend of ours had a gift quite apart, a mixture of humour, wit and satire, something dry, comic, quaint, peculiarly his own.
“It reminds me,” said a clever relation of his once in our hearing, “of an old wood carving.”
We understood what he meant; the odd angles, the sharp turns, the simplicity, the brusque sincerity—and withal how richly genial!
In a single instance one of us beheld him almost meet his match, and that in a most unexpected manner. The pretty fairy lady, his wife, happened to comment with surprise upon the fact that a woman who had been very rude to her should have attempted to greet her upon a recent occasion as if nothing had happened.
“She actually held out her hand!” she concluded.
“Well, my dear,” observed her lord, in his serious way, “that is the member most usually extended.”
To the surprise of the whole table, a shy lady on his left, who had not yet uttered a word, said in a small meek voice: “She might have put out her tongue!”
We never met that shy woman again. We should like to. “Please will you keep your Pickle out of my preserves,” he wrote to a neighbour whose dog was given to roving. The neighbour bore a name well known in grocers’ lists.
For two days the wind has been blowing over the moors from the east. The sound of it through the trees on the hill-side is like the roar of a torrent; and now and again it is like the wash of waves upon the beach. A very unseasonable wind, but it makes a grave and beautiful music. Fortunately the Dutch Garden with its wealth of Tulips is sheltered, or there would scarce be left an unbruised petal.