‘As on my way I then did trod, The lark did roar his song to God.’
There they laughed, with tears, for this was not a jest of anybody’s purposed making, but a pinch from Nature’s pepper-castor, and it tickled the lungs to madness.
‘Paul, lad,’ said Armstrong, coming to a sudden serious end of laughter, and wiping his eyes, ‘it’s not an ungentle heart that finds it delightful to see the fleecy, silly people o’ the fields in harmony. And the reflection on the stile’s a fine bit o’ pathetics. “I’ve been happy there,” says the poor ignorance; “and I may never see it more.” It’s the etairnal hauntin’ thoct o’ man in all ages. “We’ve no abiding city here.” “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth.” “Never, never more,” says poor Poe’s raven. Listen, m’n! Ye’ll hear Shakespeare’s immortal thunder. The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces dissolve with the great globe itself and all that it inherits. It’s all there, Paul. It’s in the hiccoughing throat of him. Puir felly! Well just put him into decent English, and see that naebody else shall laugh at him.’
So they trimmed the local bard, and made him sober, and even mildly sweet; and when, with their joint amendments, they sent the poem home, the bard refused to be edited, declined the parcel, and took his trade elsewhere.
But the tinkering of the poor verses brought Paul and his father finally together, and from that hour onward they were friends.
CHAPTER V
And now the mind of the Exile turned to the episode of Norah MacMulty—grotesque, pitiable, laughable.
Paul had pssed his seventeenth birthday, and reckoned himself a man. He was in love again, but tentatively. He had read ‘Don Juan,’ and had learned a thing or two. He conceived that he had rubbed off the first soft bloom of youth, and the idea, natural to his time of life, that he was aged and experienced had taken full hold of him.
He was not wholly certain that he adored the pretty girl at the bonnet-shop. He had never spoken to her, for one thing, and had only seen her from a distance, but she did well enough to moon about, and made an excellent peg to hang verses on.