And therewith I felt myself seized by two strong arms, lifted bodily from off my feet, and a moment later set down upon a spot of the pavement which the wind had swept clean, where I had a chance to see and to thank mv rescuer.
CHAPTER VIII.—A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE.
He was a tall and athletic-looking man, perhaps thirty years old, with a ruddy, good-humoured face, an honest pair of blue eyes, and a curling yellow beard. He wore a sealskin cap which came down over his ears, sealskin gloves which reached up above his coat-sleeves nearly to his elbows, a pea-jacket, and rubber top-boots. His beard, his eyebrows, and so much of his hair as was exposed, were dense with frozen snow, and from his moustache depended a series of icicles, like tusks, where his breath had condensed and congealed.
“I believe I have to thank you for saving my life,” I began, in such voice as I could muster, and I noticed that my utterance was thick, like that of a drunken man. “A very little more and I had been done for.”
“Yes, you were in rather a nasty box,” he admitted. “But all's well that ends well; and you're safe enough now. When I heard you calling, I thought it was a child, your voice was so thin and faint.”
“It's highly fortunate for me that you heard me at all. I had given myself up for lost. What a storm this is!”
“Yes; glorious, isn't it? It's the grandest spectacle I've ever seen. I tell you, sir, it's well for us that Nature should occasionally show us her sharp claw; otherwise we'd get to considering her a quite tame domestic pet, which she's not by any means. She's man's hereditary foe; there stands a perpetual feud between her and us, a vendetta handed down from father to son, from generation to generation. It's only by the exercise of an eternal vigilance and industry that we manage to subsist in spite of her. She's constantly striving, one way or another, to exterminate us: freeze us out, roast us out, starve us out—I know not what all. Here we are, huddled together upon this bleak, mysterious planet, parasites upon its surface, like mould on cheese, sheltering ourselves in fortresses of straw—wondering whence we came, why we're here, whither we're bound, and what the fun of the whole thing is—while she whirls us through her dark immensities, and seeks hourly to shake us off; which is rather unmannerly of her, seeing it was she herself who brought us here. Life which she gives us with one hand, she withholds with the other. She begrudges what she lavishes. Oh, it is strange, it is magnificent; it's some grand paradoxical farce, which we haven't wit enough to see the point of. Still, there's an exhilaration in the conflict, unequal though it is. She's sure to win in the end; she plays with us like a cat with a mouse, amused at our desperate antics, but confident of her power to administer a quietus when they begin to pall; yet there's a pleasure, somehow, in the struggle. They say, you know, the fox enjoys being hunted. To-day she's in a particularly frolicsome mood, and puts vim into her buffets. For my part, I'm grateful to her. She'll laugh best, because she'll laugh last; but she can't prevent my relishing my laugh meanwhile. I have not lived in vain, who have lived to experience this storm. Isn't it stimulating? I vow, it makes a man feel like a boy.”
I had stood shivering, teeth chattering, while he delivered himself of this extraordinary harangue. Now, “That would depend somewhat upon the age and the physique of the man,” I stammered.