It is the most difficult thing in the world to eat sandwiches with immense fur and woolen gloves on, and I think we ate almost as much fur as anything, and choked exceedingly during the process. Minora was angry at this, and at last pulled off her glove, but quickly put it on again.
“How very unpleasant!” she remarked after swallowing a large piece of fur.
“It will wrap round your pipes, and keep them warm,” said Irais.
“Pipes!” echoed Minora, greatly disgusted by such vulgarity.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” I said, as she continued to choke and splutter; “we are all in the same case, and I don’t know how to alter it.”
“There are such things as forks, I suppose,” snapped Minora.
“That’s true,” said I, crushed by the obviousness of the remedy; but of what use are forks if they are fifteen miles off? So Minora had to continue to eat her gloves.
By the time we had finished the sun was already low behind the trees and the clouds beginning to flush a faint pink. The old coachman was given sandwiches and soup, and while he led the horses up and down with one hand and held his lunch in the other, we packed up—or, to be correct, I packed, and the others looked on and gave me valuable advice.
This coachman, Peter by name, is seventy years old, and was born on the place, and has driven its occupants for fifty years, and I am nearly as fond of him as I am of the sun-dial; indeed, I don’t know what I should do without him, so entirely does he appear to understand and approve of my tastes and wishes. No drive is too long or difficult for the horses if I want to take it, no place impossible to reach if I want to go to it, no weather or roads too bad to prevent my going out if I wish to—to all my suggestions he responds with the readiest cheerfulness. In the summer, on fine evenings, I love to drive late and alone in the scented forests, and when I have reached a dark part stop, and sit quite still, listening to the nightingales repeating their little tune over and over again after interludes of gurgling, or, if there are no nightingales, listening to the marvelous silence, and letting its blessedness descend into my very soul. The nightingales in the forests about here all sing the same tune, and in the same key—E flat: