“Pneumatics!” repeated old Coney, taking time to digest the word. “Don’t you think, parson, that’s more in the department of the Astronomer Royal?”
One required a respite after the whistle-hunt. I put my back against the wall in the large room, and watched the different sets of long tails, then pulling fiercely at “Oranges and Lemons.” Mrs. Hill and Maria Lease sat side by side on one of the benches, both looking as sad as might be, their memories, no doubt, buried in the past. Maria Lease had never, so to say, worn a smiling countenance since the dreadful end of Daniel Ferrar.
A commotion! Half-a-dozen of the “lemons,” pulling too fiercely, had come to grief on the ground. Maria went to the rescue.
“I was just thinking of poor David, sir,” Mrs. Hill said to me, with a sigh. “How he would have enjoyed this scene: so merry and bright!”
“But he is in a brighter scene than this, you know.”
“Yes, Master Johnny, I do know it,” she said, tears trickling slowly down her cheeks. “Where he is, all things are beautiful.”
In her palmy days Mrs. Todhetley used to sing a song, of which this was the first verse:—
“All that’s bright must fade,
The brightest still the fleetest;
All that’s sweet was made
But to be lost when sweetest.”
Mrs. Hill’s words brought this song to my memory, and with it the damping reminder that nothing lasts in this world, whether of pleasure or brightness. All things must fade, or die: but in that better life to come they will last for ever. And David had entered upon it.
“Now, where’s that senseless little Nettie?”