"Yes, and cook her; but you must catch her first. Really, my dear sir, a very useful recipe in cuisine; and, hark ye, you can put the mice in the pan also. But, really, I am not bound, and cannot in justice be expected to do more. I have given you her name; and when had a culprit so peculiar and striking a designation as being the proprietor of a peripatetic menagerie?"
"Ridiculous!"
"Yes, ridiculus mus! But are you not the labouring mountain yourself, and do you not wish me to become the midwife?"
"I perceive I can make nothing of you," at length said the gentleman. "You either don't want to save your client, or the means you trust to cannot stand the test."
"God bless my soul!" roared the writer; "must I tell you again that I have given you her name and occupation? Even a cat, with nose-instinct put awry by the colour of the white race of victims, would smell her out."
Bowing the official to the door with these words, he was presently in some other ravelled web, which he disentangled with equal success and apparent ease; but, following him in his great scheme, we find him in the afternoon posting again to the farm. He found the farmer in the same collapse of hope, sitting in the arm-chair so long pressed by his wife, with his chin upon his breast, and his eyes dim and dead. The evidence had got piece by piece to his ear, paralyzing more and more the tissues of his brain; and hope had assumed the character of an impossibility in the moral world of God's government.
"You must cheer up," said the writer. "Come, some milk and whisky. Move about; I have got good news for you, but cannot trust you."
The head of the man was raised up, and a slight beam was, as it were, struck from his eye by the jerk of a sudden impulse. His step, as he moved to gratify the agent, seemed to have acquired even a spring.
"Why are you here," he said, as he brought the indispensable jug, with something even more than the five-eighths of the spiritual element added to the two glasses, "if you cannot tell me the grounds of my hope? I could not comprehend what you meant about the woman and the white mice."
"Nor do I want you to understand it; it is enough if I do," replied Mr. M——, as he put the jug to his mouth; "but this I want you to understand, in the first place, that I want an order for fifty pounds from you."