“As when a man, a sluice–captain, adown from a backwater headspring,
All through his plants and garden a waterflow is pioneering,
Holding a shovel in hand, from the carrier casting the sods out;
Then as it goes flowing forward, the pebbles below in a bevy
Swirl about, and it rapidly wimpling down paterooneth,
In a spot where a jump of the ground is, and overgets even the guideman.”
Il. xxi. 257.
So sweet Amy, being under–drawn of her native crystal by many a sly innuendo and many an Artesian auger, gushed out, like liquid diamonds, upon the skilful Georgie, and piled upon her a flood of truth, a Scamander upon Achilles. Oh water upon a duckʼs back, because Georgie always swam in truth; please not to say that Castalia, rore puro, wets not the kerchief of a lady thrice dipped in Styx.
And so it came to pass that young Amy let out everything, having a natural love of candour and a natural hatred of Georgie, and expecting to overwhelm her with the rolling seventh billow of truth. Mrs. Corklemore, softly smiling, reared her honest head out of the waters, sleeked her soft luxuriant locks, and the only thing likely to overwhelm her was sympathy unfathomable. Amy did not wish for that, and begged her, very dryly, by no means to exhaust herself; for Amy had moral scent of a liar, even as her father had.
Now that father—the finest fellow, take him for all in all, whom one need wish to look upon—was (according to a good manʼs luck) in fearful tribulation. Fearful, at least, to any man except John Rosedew himself; but John, though fully alive to the stigmotype of his position, allowed his epidermis to quill toward the operator, and abstracted all his too sensitive parts into a Sophistic apory.