The journey to Cannoffice was resumed with reluctance on our part and on the part of the Tommies, who were beginning to think that the thing was getting past a joke and looked horribly like business. Our best sympathies were given to them as we fought our way along the remainder of that afternoon’s sixteen miles, decimating uselessly the hungry host of horse-flies that every hedge recruited, flying from them at a ludicrous full gallop, waving them back with branches of trees; perhaps it would be truer to say that the Tommies had our second-best sympathies. The noblest compassion of our hearts was lavished on ourselves. The Tommies certainly played their part in the strife with ingenuity that, in some degree, made up for the inadequacy of their pigmy tails. They kicked flies off their stomachs and shoulders as artlessly and easily as dogs; they bit their legs down to the pastern; they rubbed themselves against the delicious angularities of the hold-alls; they buried their faces in our habits in a way that would have been maddening, if it had not appealed so torturingly to our pity.
It was eight o’clock before we reached Cannoffice, and the brilliant sky of summer had lost but little of its radiancy. We and the Tommies had perceptibly lost ours, but still the thing was done. We had passed from among the lumpy green hills, and had, by slow ascent, reached more open country, which had a tendency and a meaning in its strong, large, upward curve. Already the faint ridge of the mountains was on the horizon, and the balm of the uplands was
The first flies.
in the air. The old Cannoffice Inn looked pleasantly at us out of its ivied windows and low porch; we took it for the vicarage till we saw upon it the mystic sign of the winged wheel which marks the approval of the cyclist club. In the evening, when we wandered between the dense beech and yew hedges of the garden, or sat in a dark arbour and heard the cattle cropping the dewy grass, the ineffable pastoralities of the place made themselves felt. Children and dogs were playing noisily on a hill opposite; out in the unseen hamlet behind a grove of pine-trees there was now and then a distant snatch of voices singing in harmony; and garden perfumes, cooled in night air, spoke of peace and of a hundred sleeping roses. We forgot that our legs were stiffening into acute angles, that our foreheads had been phrenologically remodelled by horse-fly bites, and that our house-shoes were circling round Wales in a luggage-train. And that, I think, was how I caught one of my very finest colds in my head.
CHAPTER III.
Next morning Miss O’Flannigan went out sketching. The casual reader may skim this information permissively, as a harmless, picturesque thing, very proper for young ladies; but to the companion of Miss O’Flannigan’s travels it has other aspects. For example, the aspect of Miss O’Flannigan herself, as she sat on a paling with her feet tucked up, her hat tilted over a scarlet face, and her teeth clenched on a spare paint-brush; or mine, as I leaned on the rail of a footbridge over against her, in the furnace heat of the sun, with what negligence remains to the model who has stiffened for twenty minutes in the attitude so lightly and luxuriously undertaken. It must be admitted, however, that the cold caught the night before
