Shaking with laughter, I followed her example. Yet the vigour with which I did it, combined with my clumsier masculine methods, had unfortunate consequences. I choked and sputtered and turned a good deal down my coat ere I was able to get any satisfaction out of my labours. However, when I had learned to control my impatience, and had found the true knack of drinking hot milk out of my own hat, it was almost worth enduring the pangs of so shrewd a hunger to have such an exquisite recompense. One hatful did not suffice us either. We returned to the cow again and again; and with such excellent consequences, that for the nonce, we were both strongly agreed that no meal of rare dishes served on silver with powdered servants behind our chairs had ever given us any pleasure to approach our present one. Indeed, so delicately satisfied did we feel within, and such a sense of sweet lassitude was stealing over us, as made the thoughts of our couch of straw a thousand times more delectable than any pillows and lavender sheets we had ever slept in--nay, we really marvelled that if this was a state of mind incident to a vagabond roving life, how any one could ever do aught else but adopt it? Truly it must be the ignorance of the world. People could not know of these Arcadian delights. Who would trouble else to be a peer, for ever sweating and fuming in the toils of one's position, spending one's days in contriving fresh devices for the defeat of weariness and in the excitement of new appetites? Who would game and drink every night in order to forget the _ennui_ of the world, only to find day by day that instead of forgetting it, the intolerable oppression of it did increase? After shaking down several bundles of sweet-smelling hay and making of it a rare soft bed, I was about to lie in it, when the propriety of the feminine character was most excellently manifested. With a good deal of confusion in her voice, and I'll swear in her face too, though unhappily the darkness of this far corner was so great I could not observe it, my companion intimated her modest doubts. It seemed we had not yet been through the hands of the clergyman. Be sure that this marvellously bashful proper miss did not use words of this rude character. In faith, I hardly think that she used words at all; and if she did, certainly not more than three at a time, and even they were of such a nature that taken by themselves they could have no meaning whatever. But so evident were the poor child's modest distresses, and so keen her desire not to act in anywise contrary to the conventions of that propriety in which her sex has ever been foremost, that I nearly cracked a rib with my vulgar mirth. "So be it, Mrs. Puritan," says I. "But upon my soul more _bourgeois_ reasons I never heard. 'Fore Gad, though, a most meritorious respectability."