“You progress speedily!” answered Sclaug. “That is very nice.”
“Well,” Kerin admitted, “such is one way of describing the matter. But no doubt other things are equally true: and optimism, anyhow, costs nothing.”
45.
The Gander Also Generalizes
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
SO began a snug life for Kerin. The nineteen candles remained always as he had first seen them, tranquilly lighting the vast windless corridor, burning, but not ever burning down, nor guttering, nor even needing to be snuffed: and Kerin worked his way from one candle to another, as Kerin read each book in every alcove. When Kerin was tired he slept: all the while that he waked he gave to acquiring knowledge: he had no method nor any necessity of distinguishing between his daily and his nocturnal studies.
Sclaug went out and came back intermittently, bringing food for Kerin. Sclaug returned as a rule with blood upon his lips and chin. When Sclaug was away, Kerin had to make the best—a poor best,—of the company of the garrulous large gander which lived in the brown cage.
Then, also, unusual creatures, many of them not unlike men and women, would come sometimes, during these absences of Sclaug,—whom, for some reason or another, they seemed to dislike,—and they invoked the gander, and paid his price, and ceremonies would ensue. Ever-busy Kerin could not, of course, spare from his reading much time to notice these ornithomantic and probably pagan rites. Yet he endured such interruptions philosophically; because, at least, he reflected, they put an end for that while to the gander’s perilously sweet and most distracting singing.
And several years thus passed; and Kerin had no worries in any manner to interrupt him except the gander. That inconsiderate bird insisted upon singing, with a foolish, damnable sort of charm: and so, was continually checking Kerin’s pursuit of knowledge, with anserine rhapsodies about beauty and mystery and holiness and heroism and immortality, and about a variety of other unscientific matters.
“For life is very marvelous,” this gander was prone to remark, “and to the wonders of earth there is no end appointed.”