“Hullo, hullo, Jacksprat!” cried a rough voice. “What dost thou here at this hour?”
“They were noisy in the auberge,” answered the childish treble, “and I could not sleep.”
I went on my way with a smile. To have used the boat and cast it adrift would not have prospered me so well as did this accident. Yet I felt a shame of meanness to hear the little thing, taking its lying cue from me, lie to the men, and I wished I had not clinched my purchase of his silence with that promise of a louis-d’or.
Pushing boldly across a wide moon-dappled margin of grass, so thronged with trees as to afford one good cover, I came out suddenly into a field-track running southwards, and along this I sped at a fast pace. But presently, seeing figures mounting towards me from the dip of a flying slope, I dived into a belt of corn that ran on my left between the track and the skirt of a dense wood, and lay close among the stalks waiting for the travellers to pass. This, however, to my chagrin, they did not; but, when they were come right over against me, they stopped, very disputative and voluble in a breathless manner, and lashed one another with knotty thongs of patriotism.
“But who wants virtue or moderation in a Commonwealth?”
“Dost not thou?”
“I?—I want heads—a head for every cobblestone in the Rue St Jacques. I would walk on the brains of self-seekers. This Roland——”
“He wore strings in his shoes to rebuke the vanity of the Veto——”
“And to indulge his own. Head of a cabbage! thou wouldst weep over the orator though he condemned thy belly to starvation. What! shall I satisfy my hunger with a thesis on the beauty of self-denial, because, like a drum, it has a full sound!”
“Be sure I do not defend him; but has he not practised what he taught?”