"And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly: yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind.
"He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies...."
Once he paused long, towards the end of a sermon, while the thunder withdrew with a terrible solemnity which he envied; and he did not hesitate to follow the thunder with the words, "It has been said," and so to end.
The Poacher
One who used to come in late, years ago, was Gwilym Pritchard, the poacher.
BRIDGE, CWM-Y-GLO—EVENING
I wish to make a nice distinction between poachers and poachers. The man who is nothing but a poacher I regard as one only in the strict literal sense. Such a man is rare to-day. Formerly he went to the woods as another man went to the Bar. He lived like a gentleman upon other men's venison, and was beneath the pleasure of salt-pork broth. He would swagger about the hamlet with a deer on his back. The deer was but a carcass at sixpence the pound to him. He has lately stooped to dictate his autobiography, which may be bought over the counter. A less majestical note was never sounded. He turned gamekeeper, and no doubt touched his cap for half-a-sovereign, and stared at his palm for a crown. He is, in short, "one of God's creatures." But the nobler one I have in mind seemed to bear high office in the scheme of the natural world. A mighty man, capable of killing anything and of sparing anything too, he was a true scholar in his kind. The pedants who peep and botanise and cry "allium" or "cnicus" to one another in the awful woods, and the sublime enthusiasts who cannot see the earth for the flowers, were equally beneath him. He would give twelve hours a day at least to the open air, as a scholar to his books. Thus he had acquired a large erudition which would probably have exhausted a whole field of inquiry if written down. It is fortunate that faultless observers like this hand down nothing to posterity, since it leaves us in these latter days free to feel ourselves discoverers when we come upon what hundreds have known during the last thousand years. In the case of this man, the knowledge came out not so much in speech—of which he was economical—as in infinite tact,
Wearing all that weight
Of learning lightly like a flower.