I gave him something to buy tobacco, and watched him as he crawled away,
with a sort of stunned surprise. And he had actually seen Nelson sit by
Lady Hamilton! It was so strange, to have that gay Italian bay, with all
its memories,—the orgies of Baiæ, and the unburied wrecks of ancient
towns, with the smoking crater far above; and the world-famous
Nile-mouths and those great old wars, big with the destinies of the
world; and those great old heroes, with their awful deeds for good and
evil, all brought so suddenly and livingly before me, up there in the
desolate moorland, where the deer, and birds, and heath, and rushes were
even as they had been from the beginning. Like Wordsworth with his
Leech-Gatherer (a poem which I, in spite of laughter, must rank among his
very highest),—
‘While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The old man’s shape, and speech—all troubled me;
In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace
About the weary moors continually,
Wandering about alone and silently.
. . . and when he ended,
I could have laughed myself to scorn to find
In that decrepit man so firm a mind.’
Just then I heard a rustle, and turning, saw Claude toiling down to me
over the hill-side. He joined me, footsore and weary, but in great
excitement; for the first minute or two he could not speak, and at last,—
‘Oh, I have seen such a sight!—but I will tell you how it all was. After
I left you I met a keeper. He spoke civilly to me—you know my antipathy
to game and those who live thereby: but there was a wild, bold,
self-helping look about him and his gun alone there in the waste—and
after all he was a man and a brother. Well, we fell into talk, and
fraternized; and at last he offered to take me to a neighbouring hill and
show me “sixty head of red-deer all together;” and as he spoke he looked
quite proud of his words. “I was lucky,” he said, “to come just then,
for the stags had all just got their heads again.” At which speech I
wondered; but was silent, and followed him, I, Claude the Cockney, such a
walk as I shall never take again. Behold these trousers—behold these
hands! scratched to pieces by crawling on all-fours through the heather.
But I saw them.’
‘A sight worth many pairs of plaid trousers?’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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