“Don’t know, Max. I’m not weather-wise. Can’t say that I understand much about calms or storms, proverbial or otherwise, and don’t much care.”
“That’s not like your usual philosophical character, Lumley,” said I—“see, the column is still quite perpendicular—”
“Come, Max,” interrupted my friend, “don’t get sentimental till after supper. Go to work, and pluck that bird while I fill the kettle.”
“If anything can drive away sentiment,” I replied, taking up one of the birds which we had shot that day, “the plucking and cleaning of this will do it.”
“On the contrary, man,” returned Lumley, taking up the tin kettle as he spoke, “true sentiment, if you had it, would induce you to moralise on that bird as you plucked it—on the romantic commencement of its career amid the reeds and sedges of the swamps in the great Nor’-west; on the bold flights of its maturer years over the northern wilderness into those mysterious regions round the pole, which man, with all his vaunted power and wisdom, has failed to fathom, and on the sad—I may even say inglorious—termination of its course in a hunter’s pot, to say nothing of a hunter’s stom—”
“Lumley,” said I, interrupting, “do try to hold your tongue, if you can, and go fill your kettle.”
With a laugh he swung off to a spring that bubbled at the foot of a rock hard by, and when he returned I had my bird plucked, singed, split open, and cleaned out. You must understand, reader, that we were not particular. We were wont to grasp the feathers in large handfuls, and such as would not come off easily we singed off.
“You see, Lumley,” said I, when he came back, “I don’t intend that this bird shall end his career in the pot. I’ll roast him.”
“’Tis well, most noble Max, for I wouldn’t let you pot him, even if you wished to. We have only one kettle, and that must be devoted to tea.”
It was not long before the supper was ready. While it was preparing Lumley and I sat chatting by the fire, and gazing in a sort of dreamy delight at the glorious view of land and water which we could see through an opening among the trees in front of us; for, not only was there the rich colouring of autumn everywhere—the greens, yellows, browns, and reds of mosses, grasses, and variegated foliage—but there was a bright golden glow cast over all by the beams of the setting sun.