That there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, was a maxim he acted upon, if he never heard it. Within a month of the above incident he proposed to another lady upon the sole grounds that, when playing a game of chess, an exchange of pieces being contemplated, she innocently, but incautiously, observed, ‘If you take me, I will take you.’ He referred the matter next day to my ripe judgment. As I had no partiality for the lady in question, I strongly advised him to accept so obvious a challenge, and go down on his knees to her at once. I laid stress on the knees, as the accepted form of declaration, both in novels and on the stage.
In this case the beloved object, who was not embarrassed by excess of amiability, promptly desired him, when he urged his suit, ‘not to make a fool of himself.’
My tutor’s peculiarities, however, were not confined to his endeavours to meet with a lady rectoress. He sometimes surprised his hearers with the originality of his abstruse theories. One morning he called me into the stable yard to join in consultation with his gardener as to the advisability of killing a pig. There were two, and it was not easy to decide which was the fitter for the butcher. The rector selected one, I the other, and the gardener, who had nurtured both from their tenderest age, pleaded that they should be allowed to ‘put on another score.’ The point was warmly argued all round.
‘The black sow,’ said I (they were both sows, you must know)—‘The black sow had a litter of ten last time, and the white one only six. Ergo, if history repeats itself, as I have heard you say, you should keep the black, and sacrifice the white.’
‘But,’ objected the rector, ‘that was the white’s first litter, and the black’s second. Why shouldn’t the white do as well as the black next time?’
‘And better, your reverence,’ chimed in the gardener. ‘The number don’t allays depend on the sow, do it?’
‘That is neither here nor there,’ returned the rector.
‘Well,’ said the gardener, who stood to his guns, ‘if your reverence is right, as no doubt you will be, that’ll make just twenty little pigs for the butcher, come Michaelmas.’
‘We can’t kill ’em before they are born,’ said the rector.
‘That’s true, your reverence. But it comes to the same thing.’