He shoved away his Tauchnitz Herodotus in his shooting–coat pocket. Neither of the men he met was a scholar; neither would feel any interest in it. Being driven forth by his fatherʼs grumbling at the little pleasure he showed in the fuss that was making about him, he had brought his genial, true cosmopolite to show him a thing which his heart would have loved. Cradock had doubled down the leaf whereon was described the building of the boat–bridge over the Hellespont. Neither had he forgotten the interment of the Scythian kings. It was not that he purposed to instruct the carpenters thence, or to shed any light on their doings; but that he hoped to learn from them some words to jot down on the margin. He had discovered already, being helped thereto by the tongue of Ytene, that hundreds of forcible Saxon words still lurk in the crafts to which the beaten race betook itself—words which are wanted sadly, and pieced out very unpleasantly by roundabout foreign fanglements.
Even the gratitude now due to the good–will of all the neighbourhood, had failed to reconcile his mind to the turgid part before him. At Oxford he had been dubbed already “Caradoc the Philosopher”; and the more he learned, the less he thought of his own importance. He had never regarded the poor around him as dogs made for him to whistle to; he even knew that he owed them some duties, and wondered how to discharge them. Though bred of high Tory lineage, and corded into it by the twists of habit and education, he never could hang by neck and gullet; he never could show basement only, as a well–roped onion does. Encased as he was by strict surroundings, he never could grow quite straight and even, without a seed inside him, as a prize cucumber does in the cylinder of an old chimney–glass.
Some of this dereliction sprang, no doubt, from his granulation, and some from the free trade of his mind with the great heart called “John Rosedew”.
Now he came up, and smiled, like a boy of fourteen, in Mr. Garnetʼs face; for he liked Bull Garnetʼs larger qualities, and had no fear of his smaller ones. Mr. Garnet never liked; he always loved or hated. He loved Cradock Nowell heartily, and heartily hated Clayton.
“Behind my time, you see, Cradock. I am glad you are doing my duty.—Ha, there! I see you, my man”.
The man was skulking his work, in rigging out with coloured lamps an old oak fifty yards off. That ancient oak, the pride of the chase, was to represent, to–morrow night, a rainbow reflecting “Cradock Nowell”. Young Crad, who regarded it all as ill–taste, if it were not positive sin, had lifted his voice especially against that oakʼs bedizenment. “It will laugh at us from every acorn”, he had said to his father. But Sir Cradock was now a man of sixty; and threescore resents being budded. The incision results in gum only.
At the sound of that tremendous voice, the man ran recklessly out on the branch, the creaking of which had alarmed him. Snap went the branch at a cankered part, and the poor fellow dropped from a height of nearly forty feet. But the crashing wood caught in the bough beneath, which was sound and strong, and there hung the man, uninjured as yet, clinging only by one arm, and struggling to throw his feet up. In a moment Cradock had seized a ladder, reared, and fixed, and mounted it, and helped the poor fellow to slide off upon it, and stayed him there gasping and quivering. Bull Garnet set foot on the lowest rung, and Rufus Hutton added his weight, which was not very considerable. A dozen workmen came running up, and the man, whose nerves had quite failed him, was carefully eased to the ground.
“Mr. Garnet”, said Cradock, with flashing eyes, “would you have walked on that branch yourself”?
“To be sure I would, after I had looked at it”.
“But you gave this poor man no time to look. Is it brave to make another do what you yourself would fear”?