“Some says dat d’yar is as good fish in de sea as ever was cotched out of it; but I tells ’em, when you done pulled in one to suit you, you better row for de sho’ less a squall come and upsot de boat. Well, good-evenin’, Miss Alice, and good-evenin’, Marse Charley!” And with polite left foot and courteous right the black ploughman sent rolling the shining sand.
“There, now,” said Alice, “you see! What did I tell you?”
“Oh,” replied Charley, “Sam will keep dark!”
Yes, those were his very words! And Alice acknowledges that he made the one recorded above (though I see he has denied it). Such is ever the ruin wrought by love, even in the mind of a philosopher.
“By the way,” said Alice, as she stood with her feet upon the gunwale of the Argo, ready to spring, “in the rather mixed metaphors of honest Sam, which of us was the fish and which the hook? ‘Porpoise,’” quoted she, laughing, “I trust I don’t remind you of one?”
Charley, who stood in the sand, held one of Alice’s hands in each of his with a degree of pressure entirely incommensurate with the necessities of equilibrium: “✻ ✻ ✻ ✻ ✻” sang he, with a rapt and fatuous smile. “✻ ✻ ✻ ✻ ✻ ✻ ✻ Absence of wings ✻ ✻ ✻ vision ✻ ✻ ✻ ✻ eyes beheld.” For, upon my word, the reader must not expect me to transcribe more than a word, here and there, of such jargon.
Yet, though my tongue be harsh, I do not in my heart blame Charley; for Alice, at all times a pretty girl, was, just at this moment, as she stood above him with the dark sky for a background, radiantly beautiful in his eyes. And more,—
She looked beautiful on purpose.
I repeat it,—she did it on purpose.
And here, though it is abhorrent to all my art-instincts to break the current of my story with anything like a thought, original or selected,—though I have promised the reader to place before him a succession of pictures merely, without even adding, This is Daniel, and, These are the Lions!—I feel that I have used an expression requiring an explanation. That explanation I cannot give save through the medium of what—disguise it how I will—wears the semblance of a thought.