“Your open declaration, Sir, backed by certain evidences of its obvious truth, ought to have taken you safely through the worst infested thicket hereabouts.”
“No doubt, no doubt; but I am glad it is you and not another—first, because desirable friendships are rarely made by moonlight; and secondly, because you have been in my mind the few hours since we parted.”
“I am honored in that particular, and your courtesy moves me the more because I was only now thinking there were none upon the face of the earth who were doing so much by me.”
“You are green, young man, and therefore apt to let a passing whim, a shadow of disappointment, lead to hasty generalizing. You fared not as you hoped at yonder Court?” And the old man bent his keen gray eyes upon me with a searching shrewdness there was no gainsaying.
“No! in faith I fared badly beyond all expectation.”
“And what were you projecting just now when, like the ass of Balaam, this most patient beast saw you in the way and interrupted my reflection so roughly?”
“Why, at that very moment, Sir,” I said, “I was looking for a likely place to pass the night.”
“What, on the moss? with no better hangings to your couch than these lean, draughty, leafless boughs?”
“’Tis an honorable bed, Sir, and I have fared worse when I have been far richer.”
“Oh! what a happy thing it is to be young and full of choler and folly! Not but that I have done the same myself,” chuckled the old man: “for thou knowest mandrake must be gathered only at the full moon, and hemlock roots are digged in the dark—many a twilight such as this I spent groping in the murky woods, picking those things that witches love—and not gone home with full wallet until the owls were homing and the pale white stars were waxing sickly in the morning light. Nevertheless, Sir, take an old man’s word, and presume not too largely on the immunities of youth.”