For my part, I believe that the Big Doctor viewed with a justified composure " ... that last Wild pageant of the accumulated past That clangs and flashes for a drowning man." CHAPTER XLI In that same wind-wild dawn, Larry awoke, and tried to believe that he was a bridegroom, and was going to espouse Tishy Mangan in the course of the next few hours. "_C'est toujours l'imprévu qui arrive_!" he told himself. That ancient ditty, "The Yeoman's Wedding," that he had often heard Dr. Mangan sing, attacked him like an illness, and enforced its galloping metres on all he did. "Through the valley we'll haste, For we've no time to waste! For it is my wedding morning, my wedding morning!" The housemaid (that same Upper Housemaid who had spoken of the riff-raff of Cluhir) heard him, in the bathroom, loudly announcing his intentions. "Ding dong! We'll gallop along!" Larry sang, and the Upper Housemaid said to her subordinate, "What a hurry he's in! Well! Bright's his fancy!" The Upper Housemaid was rash in thus giving her opinion. Larry's fancy was far from bright, but he was of those unfortunates who, when obsessed by a tune, must yield to its importunity, even though it followed him to the steps of the scaffold. It is not insinuated that Larry was now, metaphorically, or otherwise, in such a case. He was, as he told himself, quite prepared to go through with the job, but, he likewise told himself, it was a rotten sort of business dressing for your wedding with not a soul, bar the servants, to say good morning to, and even they looked as sour as lemons and hadn't a smile among the lot of them. Larry drank some coffee, and crumbled some toast, and brutally and wastefully broke into a poached egg, turning what had been a triumph of snow, into a yellow peril, and gave its attendant bacon to Aunt Freddy's old Pomeranian, and found that he had finished his breakfast, and that it was no more than ten o'clock. The rain was coming down in torrents; he could not go out, not even to the stables. What on earth was he to do from now till one o'clock? The blooming wedding was at two. He thought of it as some one else's, and realised that he so thought of it, and then just tripped himself up in the middle of the further reflection that he wished it were. "Probably getting married is always a bore," he said to himself, consolingly. "'E's all right when you know 'im, but you've got to know 'im fust'! Why do these rotten old songs stick in my head like this? Because I'm a fool, no doubt, and always was!" He walked into the hall, and there surveyed his luggage, packed and ready, and appallingly new. "It'll give the show away, even if they let us off confetti," he thought. He wished he hadn't given in to this High Nuptial Mass business, and a big wedding, and all the rest of it, but the Doctor and Tishy were dead keen on it, and he had been sat on.