Min and I were walking in front, talking seriously and reflectively, as befitted the time and place.
We were moralising how—
“Side by side
The poor man and the son of pride
Lie calm and still.”
“I wonder,” said Min, “whether it is true that the dust of the departed dead blossoms out again in flowers and trees, replenishing the earth? Just fancy, how many illustrious persons even have died since the beginning of the world! Why, in England alone we could number our heroes by thousands; and it is nice to think that they may still flourish perhaps in these old oak trees above us!”
“Ah,” said I, “don’t you recollect those lines about England;—
“‘Beneath each swinging forest bough,
Some arm as stout in death reposes—
From wave-washed foot to heaven-kissed brow,
Her valour’s life-blood runs in roses;
Nay, let our brothers of the West
Write, smiling, in their florid pages,
One half her soil has walked the rest,
In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages!’”
“What!” exclaimed Mr Mawley, who had come up close behind us before we perceived him, and at once pushed into the conversation. “‘One half our soil has walked the rest,’ Lorton? That’s a palpable absurdity! We’ll take England to be three hundred miles long and two hundred broad, on an average; and, allowing a uniform depth of twelve feet throughout for cultivable soil, that calculation will give us some—let me see, three hundred by two hundred, multiplied by seventeen hundred and sixty to bring it into yards, and then by three to reduce it to feet, when we multiply it again by twelve to get the solidity—that gives us nearly four billions cubic feet of soil, one-half of which would be two billions. Fancy, Lorton, two thousand millions cubic feet of heroes, eh! But, you havn’t told us what amount of dust and ashes you would apportion to each separate hero—” he thus proceeded, with his caustic wit, seeing that Bessie Dasher and her sister were both laughing; and even Min was smiling, at his absurdities. “Strange, perhaps Oliver Cromwell is now a mangel wurzel, and poor King Charles the First an apple tree! Depend upon it, Lorton, that is the origin of what is called the King Pippin!”
He made me “as mad as a hatter,” with his “chaff” at my favourite quotation.
I was almost boiling over with rage.
I restrained myself, however, at the moment, and answered him in, for me, comparatively mild terms.