Yeast: a Problem | Page 9

charming daughters, at the Priory. In
with you, little Mustang of the prairie! Neck or nothing!'--
And in an instant the small wiry American, and the huge Horncastle-
bred hunter, were wallowing and staggering in the yeasty stream, till
they floated into a deep reach, and swam steadily down to a low place
in the bank. They crossed the stream, passed the Priory Shrubberies,
leapt the gate into the park, and then on and upward, called by the
unseen Ariel's music before them.--Up, into the hills; past white
crumbling chalk-pits, fringed with feathered juniper and tottering ashes,
their floors strewed with knolls of fallen soil and vegetation, like
wooded islets in a sea of milk.--Up, between steep ridges of tuft crested
with black fir-woods and silver beech, and here and there a huge yew
standing out alone, the advanced sentry of the forest, with its luscious
fretwork of green velvet, like a mountain of Gothic spires and pinnacles,
all glittering and steaming as the sun drank up the dew-drops. The lark
sprang upward into song, and called merrily to the new-opened
sunbeams, while the wreaths and flakes of mist lingered reluctantly
about the hollows, and clung with dewy fingers to every knoll and belt

of pine.--Up into the labyrinthine bosom of the hills,--but who can
describe them? Is not all nature indescribable? every leaf infinite and
transcendental? How much more those mighty downs, with their
enormous sheets of spotless turf, where the dizzy eye loses all standard
of size and distance before the awful simplicity, the delicate vastness,
of those grand curves and swells, soft as the outlines of a Greek Venus,
as if the great goddess-mother Hertha had laid herself down among the
hills to sleep, her Titan limbs wrapt in a thin veil of silvery green.
Up, into a vast amphitheatre of sward, whose walls banked out the
narrow sky above. And here, in the focus of the huge ring, an object
appeared which stirred strange melancholy in Lancelot,--a little chapel,
ivy-grown, girded with a few yews, and elders, and grassy graves. A
climbing rose over the porch, and iron railings round the churchyard,
told of human care; and from the graveyard itself burst up one of those
noble springs known as winter-bournes in the chalk ranges, which,
awakened in autumn from the abysses to which it had shrunk during the
summer's drought, was hurrying down upon its six months' course, a
broad sheet of oily silver over a temporary channel of smooth
greensward.
The hounds had checked in the woods behind; now they poured down
the hillside, so close together 'that you might have covered them with a
sheet,' straight for the little chapel.
A saddened tone of feeling spread itself through Lancelot's heart. There
were the everlasting hills around, even as they had grown and grown
for countless ages, beneath the still depths of the primeval chalk ocean,
in the milky youth of this great English land. And here was he, the
insect of a day, fox-hunting upon THEM! He felt ashamed, and more
ashamed when the inner voice whispered--'Fox- hunting is not the
shame--thou art the shame. If thou art the insect of a day, it is thy sin
that thou art one.'
And his sadness, foolish as it may seem, grew as he watched a brown
speck fleet rapidly up the opposite hill, and heard a gay view- halloo
burst from the colonel at his side. The chase lost its charm for him the
moment the game was seen. Then vanished that mysterious delight of

pursuing an invisible object, which gives to hunting and fishing their
unutterable and almost spiritual charm; which made Shakespeare a
nightly poacher; Davy and Chantrey the patriarchs of fly-fishing; by
which the twelve-foot rod is transfigured into an enchanter's wand,
potent over the unseen wonders of the water-world, to 'call up spirits
from the vasty deep,' which will really 'come if you do call for them'--at
least if the conjuration be orthodox--and they there. That spell was
broken by the sight of poor wearied pug, his once gracefully-floating
brush all draggled and drooping, as he toiled up the sheep-paths
towards the open down above.
But Lancelot's sadness reached its crisis, as he met the hounds just
outside the churchyard. Another moment--they had leaped the rails; and
there they swept round under the gray wall, leaping and yelling, like
Berserk fiends among the frowning tombstones, over the cradles of the
quiet dead.
Lancelot shuddered--the thing was not wrong--'it was no one's
fault,'--but there was a ghastly discord in it. Peace and strife, time and
eternity--the mad noisy flesh, and the silent immortal spirit,--the
frivolous game of life's outside show, and the terrible earnest of its
inward abysses, jarred together without and within him. He pulled his
horse up violently, and stood as