“Satan finds some mischief still for idle brains to do.”
Talking of Rockstro, he scolded me once and said he wondered how I could have done such a thing as to call Handel “one of the greatest of all musicians,” referring to the great chords in Erewhon. I said that if he would look again at the passage he would find I had said not that Handel was “one of the greatest” but that he was “the greatest of all musicians,” on which he apologised.
Pigs
We often walk from Rickmansworth across Moor Park to Pinner. On getting out of Moor Park there is a public-house just to the left where we generally have some shandy-gaff and buy some eggs. The landlord had a noble sow which I photographed for him; some months afterwards I asked how the sow was. She had been sold. The landlord knew she ought to be killed and made into bacon, but he had been intimate with her for three years and some one else must eat her, not he.
“And what,” said I, “became of her daughter?”
“Oh, we killed her and ate her. You see we had only known her eighteen months.”
I wonder how he settled the exact line beyond which intimacy with a pig must not go if the pig is to be eaten.
Mozart
An old Scotchman at Boulogne was holding forth on the beauties of Mozart, which he exemplified by singing thus:
