CHAPTER V.
A Tale of the French Revolution.—The Barber's Story.
The following morning broke fine but frosty, and the members of the club being up sufficiently early for that time of the year, they all agreed to take a long stroll before breakfast in the adjacent wood. Indeed, the members of our club lived so thoroughly in an atmosphere of punch and tobacco-smoke that an outing every now and then was requisite in order to air their brains.
They strolled out, accordingly, by twos and threes, passing over fields glittering with hoar-frost, until they came to a stile, which having crossed over, they found themselves immediately in a wood.
It was a fine old place—that same ancient piece of woodland, where huge oaks and beeches were interspersed with the fir, pine and birch. The fantastic roots that shot out from the gnarled trunks of the majestic oaks, like giants' limbs writhing in mortal agony, were coated here and there in broad irregular patches of dank moss and variously-tinted lichen. Their distorted colossal branches, stripped of their leaves and silvered at their extremities with the hoar-frost, seemed struggling to catch the first beams of a winter sun, while the shadowy outline of the misty purple mass of distant trees brought out in bolder relief and more vigorous hue the foreground thickly strewed with richly-tinted leaves of russet, scarlet and orange. The dank fungus, luxuriant in its foul growth, emerged from the velvet moss as if to outvie in glow the variegated richness of the dried leaves of the forest.
It was a scene to awaken the soul of a poet, to inspire a landscape painter with increased love of his art; and as our two friends McGuilp and Parnassus strolled arm-in-arm together through this region of enchantment, leaving their footprints in the crisp frost, which they traversed with the buoyant footsteps of youth, leaving the elder members considerably in the rear, each felt himself drawn towards the other by a bond of common sympathy. It is not necessary to record every expression of enthusiasm that escaped the lips of our two friends, nor to follow minutely the philosophic meditations of the more mature members of the club who brought up the rear, as at every step the scene unfolded new and fresh beauties to their view.
Let it suffice our reader that their morning's walk proved highly beneficial to them all, for they returned with marvellous appetites to the inn, where a sumptuous breakfast of eggs and bacon, coffee, hot rolls, etc., had just been spread for them by the fair hands of our Helen, who waited to greet them on the doorstep.
The usual merry bantering from each member of the club in turn succeeded, as a matter of course, and was replied to on Helen's part by a pretty rustic coyness or smart repartee. Our artist thought he had never seen her look to such advantage as now, glowing in the full morning light. He noticed, too, that she was more sprucely dressed than usual. What could it mean? As he asked himself this question, the church bells of the village began to chime. The mystery was out—it was Sunday, and McGuilp's hopes of a sitting fell to the ground.