"Come up wi' ye, ye lazy divvles!" he cried at his legs, that, through their long inactivity, betrayed a certain tendency to let him down. "Div ye 'ear? 'Od up [Hold up]. Dom yer eyes ... if ye weean't do better ah 'll walk o' my knees an' shame ye."
"Gum! it 's tonnin cold," he decided, after some progress.
"Ah nivver knowed it ton so cold of a neet this time o' year," he added, a while later.
And a short way further up the road:
"Gum ... bud ah feel it i' my yed [head] strangelins!" he declared, and putting up an inquisitive hand to learn the cause of it, was blankly amazed to discover himself hatless.
"Well! of all ... bud that 's a caution!" he said, and stopped as dead as his legs would let him. "Well ... it 's no use seekin' after spilt milk. Noo ah s'll 'a to mek best on it."
The best of it he made forthwith; and to compensate for this frigidity of head he put such warmth of pace into his advancement that at times—with his head a body's length in front of his feet, and his feet churning in the rear like twin-screws—his progress was considerable. To have stopped under a road's length would have been to fall as flat as a pancake. Nothing short of the most gradual arrest could preserve his equilibrium, and as the easiest solution of the problem was not to stop at all, he forged ahead till the wind whistled on either side of his ears. And this constant freshness, combined with the exposed state of his head, so sobered and revivified him that, by the time he was passing through familiar Ullbrig, he already knew what houses were which, and who lived in them; the day of the week; how long he had been absent; and was commencing, in common with the history of all these nocturnal or matutinal returns, to see the evil of drink, and speak openly of wine as a mocker.
Moodily pursuing this well-trodden path of his conversion, he slammed his way through the gates, one after another, and passed Dixon's sleeping farm-stead with a covetous eye upon its moonlit windows.
"Ay, you 've not slipped fi' pun [five pounds] doon yer belly this 'arvest-time, Jan Dixon," he reflected, as he turned his back to the scrambling white house, so calm and self-contemplative in the moonlight, and cut across towards the cliff. All his loquaciousness leaked out of him now, in sight of the goal which he had been three days aiming at and missed up to the present, and he tramped along with the impersonal passivity of a cow being driven to market; untroubled as to fate, and almost thoughtless. The sea shook the cliff, as he walked, with seismic shivers, and boomed noisily in his ears; but he 'd known it off and on now for forty years, and minded it—particularly at such moments as this—as little as the buzzing of his own eight-day clock. Of a sudden, however, the sea-surge bore up a sound to him—a small, shrill, penetrating sound, that pierced his passivity to its vital marrow, and caused him to throw up his head, with a gaping mouth to all quarters of the compass about him, for the sound's location. He was sufficiently sober by this time to realise how very drunk he had been, and in the desolating flatness of life's Sahara—lacking any pleasant green oases of illusion—that he was laboriously traversing now, he knew the sound to have been produced by real, living, human lips; for his own brain was far too stagnant to create fancies. Therefore he eased the wain-rope to the ground, and holding up his open mouth to the sky, as though it were an ear-trumpet, he listened for a repetition of this discordant note in Nature.
And again it came: small, faint, embosomed in the roaring surge, but cutting as a diamond.