“Come the twenty-fifth,” Walter added. “That be I. So here goes, Master Snail.”
With that the snail was sharply crushed underfoot, and the soliloquy continued. He is with us still, older in years, younger than ever in heart, with the same immortal personality, the same atmosphere of friendship with the gods about him. He listens to orders with a smile of amusement, just as if he had been laughing about our ways only an hour before with some inhabitant of an unseen world. He carried his own peculiar atmosphere with him of indulgent superiority and warm-heartedness combined, just as the tortoise carries his house on his back. If that story is unknown by any chance, here it is.
Jupiter’s Wedding
When the toy had once taken Jupiter in the head to enter into a state of matrimony, he resolved for the honour of his Celestial Lady, that the whole world should keep a Festival upon the day of his marriage, and so invited all living creatures, Tag-Rag and Bob-Tail, to the solemnity of his wedding. They all came in very good time, saving only the Tortoise. Jupiter told him ’twas ill done to make the Company stay, and asked him, “Why so late?” “Why truly,” says the Tortoise, “I was at home, at my own House, my dearly beloved House,” and House is Home, let it be never so Homely. Jupiter took it very ill at his hands, that he should think himself better in a Ditch than in a Palace, and so he passed this Judgment upon him: that since he would not be persuaded to come out of his House upon that occasion, he should never stir abroad again from that Day forward without his House upon his head.
This, as may be seen at once, is the Olympian aspect not only of the house, but of the garden as well. We mortals do carry our Homes with us, breathing a closer, less free air than the air of Olympus, when the reigning monarch has merely to take a toy in the head to enter into a state of matrimony. We, tortoise-like, are bound and tied by a thousand pleasant associations to our plot of earth and our patch of stars. Sooner than attend the ceremonies of the greatest, we linger by our house and in our garden, so that though we may not boast with the great world and say that we know “Dear old Jove,” or “that charming wife of his, Juno,” still we know that we live on the slopes of Olympus, and have a number of charming flowers for society.
X
EVENING RED AND MORNING GREY
Your old-fashioned man with a care to his garden will look through the quarrel of his window to spy weather signs. This quarrel, the lozenge-pane of a window made criss-cross, shows in its narrow frame a deal of Nature’s business, day and night. For your gardener it takes the part of club window, weather glass and eye hole onto his world. Through it day and night he reviews the sky and the trees, the wind, the moon and the stars. When he rises betimes there’s the sky for him to read. When he returns for his tea there in the pane is the sunset framed. When he goes to bed the moon rides past and the friendly stars twinkle.
No man is asked his opinion of the weather so much as the gardener, except, may be, the shepherd; both men having, as it were, a Professorship in weather given to them by the Public. It is they who have given rise to, or even, perhaps, invented the rhymes by which they go.