“On the contrary,� replied his friend, “your fad is far madder than mine. And I doubt if it’s any more fruitful. The moment men like you see a man sitting by a river with a rod, they are insanely impelled to ask him what he has caught. But when you go off to shoot big game, as you call it, nobody asks you what you have caught. Nobody expects you to bring home a hippopotamus for supper. Nobody has ever seen you walking up Pall Mall, followed respectfully by a captive giraffe. Your bag of elephants, though enormous, seems singularly unobtrusive; left in the cloak-room, no doubt. Personally, I doubt if you ever catch anything. It’s all decorously hidden in desert sand and dust and distance. But what I catch is something far more elusive, and as slippery as any fish. It is the soul of England.�
“I should think you’d catch a cold if not a fish,� answered Crane, “sitting dangling your feet in a pool like that. I like to move about a little more. Dreaming is all very well in its way.�
At this point a symbolic cloud ought to have come across the sun, and a certain shadow of mystery and silence must rest for a moment upon the narrative. For it was at this moment that James Crane, being blind with inspiration, uttered his celebrated Prophecy, upon which this improbable narrative turns. As was commonly the case with men uttering omens, he was utterly unconscious of anything ominous about what he said. A moment after he would probably not know that he had said it. A moment after, it was as if a cloud of strange shape had indeed passed from the face of the sun.
The prophecy had taken the form of a proverb. In due time the patient, the all-suffering reader, may learn what proverb. As it happened, indeed, the conversation had largely consisted of proverbs; as is often the case with men like Hood, whose hearts are with that old English country life from which all the proverbs came. But it was Crane who said:
“It’s all very well to be fond of England; but a man who wants to help England mustn’t let the grass grow under his feet.�
“And that’s just what I want to do,� answered Hood. “That’s exactly what even your poor tired people in big towns really want to do. When a wretched clerk walks down Threadneedle Street, wouldn’t he be really delighted if he could look down and see the grass growing under his feet; a magic green carpet in the middle of the pavement? It would be like a fairy-tale.�
“Well, but he wouldn’t sit like a stone as you do,� replied the other. “A man might let the grass grow under his feet without actually letting the ivy grow up his legs. That sounds like a fairy-tale too, if you like, but there’s no proverb to recommend it.�
“Oh, there are proverbs on my side, if you come to that,� answered Hood laughing. “I might remind you about the rolling stone that gathers no moss.�
“Well, who wants to gather moss except a few fussy old ladies?� demanded Crane. “Yes, I’m a rolling stone, I suppose; and I go rolling round the earth as the earth goes rolling round the sun. But I’ll tell you what; there’s one kind of stone that does really gather moss.�
“And what is that, my rambling geologist?�