The Wayfarers

by J. C. Snaith

As we took our way through the grass of a most charming flower-coated country, there was a kind of rivalry between us as to who should be the first to spy a church. The honour of doing so had not fallen to either of us, when Cynthia suddenly darted from the path to pick some white violets out of a hedge.

"Why," says she, in the delight of finding them, "we will make ourselves a posy apiece to carry with us to church, as it is our wedding morning. Oh, look at the marsh-marigolds at the side of the brook there!"

She gave me the violets to hold, with some injunction as to the correct manner of holding them, for my handling of them was much too crude to please her, and ran away again to fetch the pretty yellow flowers. All sorts of things she gathered for our nosegays, lady-smocks all silver white from the meadow, and daisies pied and violets blue, cowslips and even a blue-bell. Nothing would content her but that we should make them up into posies there and then; which we did, and bound them round with grasses. But hardly had we finished this pastoral employment and continued on our way, when we became the victims of a singular diversion. We passed out of one meadow over a stile into another of a similar kind. But in the second a few cows were browsing. To these we paid no heed, but walked jauntily enough through the pasture, apprehending no danger; but by the time we had come perhaps to the middle of the field we were startled by a commotion behind us. Turning round to discover whence it arose, we were horrified to find what the source of it was. A young bull with its head grounded and its tail in the air was charging down upon us. A single exclamation and a frightened instant of hesitation in which to take our bearings, and evolve a mode of escape, was all we had time for. The bull was coming so furiously that it was almost upon us, yet we were stranded full in the middle of the field, with no chance whatever of taking refuge in flight. But happily my eye lit on a tree, a sturdy young sapling a yard or two off. Thither I pushed the terrified Cynthia, and literally lifted her into one of the lower branches, whilst she, with an admirable conception of the case and how to act in it, scrambled with a mighty rending of her garments into the boughs above. I clambered after her madly, not a second too soon. The vigorous snorting young bull crashed his horns against the tree with great force. He was so near to my leg that I instinctively felt it to be gashed wide open; whilst such a mighty shake did its impact give to our place of refuge that it was indeed a mercy we were not both of us thrown on to the ground to be gored and trampled on. But despite our fright we were able to cling to the branches; and when at last I was able to get a glimpse of my leg, I found to my relief that I had been the victim of my imagination.

The bellowing beast made divers onslaughts against the bark of the tree, whilst we very fearfully hurried up higher and higher, dreading at each stroke of our enemy to feel ourselves flying through the air. Providentially, however, by clinging with rare tenacity to our vantage place we were able to maintain ourselves in the security of the highest branches of all. And presently our adversary having wreaked a good deal of his fury on the offending tree, desisted from an occupation that brought him so little profit, and having walked off a yard or two, proceeded to regard us morosely. He seemed prepared to stay in that employment too for an indefinite period. But feeling our position, snug as it was and safe for the time being, to be yet highly precarious, since the very boughs on which we sat swayed and cracked and creaked in a truly alarming fashion, I determined to play a coup, ere any melancholy thing should happen which would put it out of my power to play one.

Divesting myself with much difficulty of my cloak, although Cynthia rather audaciously, considering her own position at the time, lent me a hand, I committed that garment to her charge, and proceeded to select the most favourable moment for a speedy flight to the nearest hedge. Keeping perfectly motionless in our unhappy posture, we presently contrived to lull the unsuspecting bull into a state of quiescence which I am sure he would have been the first to admit, had he but known, the circumstances hardly warranted. For suddenly taking an advantage of his sleeping vigilance, I made a leap off the tree as far as possible from the spot on which he stood watching. It was then a case of run devil, run baker. I'm sure no poor devil ever ran more fleetly than I did then; whilst I am equally sure that there never was a baker in this world that ran more swiftly than that roaring, rampageous bullock. Luckily for my precious bones I had a fair good start of the fellow, and the distance to the hedge was less than a hundred yards. Had it been otherwise this history had never been written else, for not for a moment do I think Cynthia would ever have troubled to write it; nor between ourselves, do I think she would ever have been capable of doing so, even had her ambition jumped in that direction. Running pell-mell, my heart beating holes in my ribs, and the clear tones of Mrs. Cynthia issuing from the topmost branches of the tree in words of lusty encouragement such as: "Bravo, lad, bravo! Mightily done!" I panted to the hedge with the bull ever at my heels, and had just the strength to take a second leap at the green brambles, and half jump, half scramble through their tenacious barriers, and so into the neighbouring field, while the bull, foiled for the second time, raged and vented his disappointment from the other side.

Meanwhile little Cynthia, with a delightful intrepidity, also took advantage of our enemy. While Mr. Bull continued to thrust his head at the hedge in his mighty rage, and roared forth his threats, high-couraged little Cynthia, if you please, very simply and dexterously dropped down my cloak out of the tree, neatly dropped down after it, and then with the most gallant coolness gathered herself up again, the cloak too, and even stayed to recover our late discarded posies, which the bull had evidently thought too mean to be worthy of his regard. With these articles tucked away in one hand, she gathered her skirts in the other, and away scudded her dainty ankles through the grass to the opposite fence. All this time the bull, foiled and nonplussed as he was, continued to fume and rush at the fence that kept him from me, but never for an instant did he guess that Cynthia was in the act of cheating him too.

Convinced by this that my little one had made good her escape, I could not restrain my joy. I began to jump and clap my hands, and bellow out hearty encouragements and applause to her across the field. This behaviour so surprised the bull, that he whisked angrily round to discover the cause of it. He beheld Cynthia in the very height of her rapid victorious transit. Away he dashed, head down, in pursuit of her, but she was much too well advanced in her flight to have any fear of him whatever. By the time he had come level with the tree, Cynthia was calmly climbing into security over the stile; and when the outwitted animal rushed up and thrust his nose over it, she tauntingly, if a trifle vain-gloriously, shook the cloak and the posies at him. Never, I think, did I see an act more neatly or more bravely performed.

When we came presently together again in the middle of an adjoining field, a sort of half-way house from where the bull had respectively left us, we were both in high feather and mightily pleased with ourselves and one another.

"I declare," says I, "that hunting the fox becomes a tame and foolish sport by comparison. In all my amusements, from cards to cudgel-playing, I was never furnished, I'll swear, with so entertaining an episode. Besides, I am vastly proud of your conduct this morning, my prettiness. Come, let us waste not a moment; I am dying to get married at once."

The deep crimson in Cynthia's cheeks, that her late eminent exertions had induced, lent her even more of an adorable appearance than even I had ever observed in her. And when she tossed me my cloak, and gravely gave one of the posies into my hands, I think I never saw the eyes of a woman beam with such mirth and high spirits. Flushed and breathless as we were, no two human persons could possibly have been happier. Already our haphazard, vagrant life had proved the antidote of that weariness of the world, that fatigue of mind and body, the chains of polite life had induced. Already we had come to take a fraternal pride, as it were, in one another. We no longer had to apprehend how we should get through the day without perishing of weariness, but rather how to pass it without perishing of hunger and violence. And we were revealing such unexpected qualities to ourselves and each other in overcoming these calamities that we were falling in love anew with our own heroic attributes, and were already prepared to vow to one another that we were a monstrous well-assorted pair. Indeed, the foolish bull had given us such a fine conceit of ourselves, that on the score of the hour of high-wrought happiness he brought us, he must, I am sure, be allowed after all to be our friend.