f the better-looking
fords, and, with my trousers dangling from the iron beam on my shoulder,
entered the river. Such was the arrowy swiftness of the current,
however, that the water had scarce reached my middle when it began to
hollow out the stones and gravel from under my feet, and to bear me down
per force in a slanting direction. There was a foaming rapid just at
hand; and immediately beyond, a deep, dark pool, in which the chafed
current whirled around, as if exhausting the wrath aroused by its recent
treatment among rocks and stones, ere recovering its ordinary temper;
and had I lost footing, or been carried a little further down, I know
not how it might have fared with me in the wild foaming descent that lay
between the ford and the pool. Curiously enough, however, the one idea
which, in the excitement of the moment, filled my mind, was an intensely
ludicrous one. I would, of course, lose not only the lever in the
torrent, but my trousers also; and how was I ever to get home without
them? Where, in the name of wonder, should I get a kilt to borrow? I
have oftener than once experienced this strange sensation of the
ludicrous in circumstances with which a different feeling would have
harmonized better. Byron represents it as rising in extreme grief: it
is, however, I suspect, greatly more common in extreme danger; and all
the instances which the poet himself gives in his note--Sir Thomas More
on the scaffold, Anne Boleyn in the Tower, and those victims of the
French Revolution "with whom it became a fashion to leave some _mot_ as
a legacy"--were all jokers rather in circumstances of desperate and
hopeless peril than of sorrow. It is, however, in danger, us certainly
as in grief, a joyless sort of mirth.

"That playfulness of sorrow ne'er beguiles;
It smiles in bitterness: but still it smiles,
And sometimes with the wisest and the best.
Till even the scaffold echoes with their jest."

The feeling, however, though an inharmoniously toned, is not a
weakening one. I laughed in the stream, but I did not yield to it; and,
making a violent effort, when just on the edge of the rapid, I got into
stiller water, and succeeded in making my way to the opposite bank,
drenched to the arm-pits. It was in nearly the same reach of the Conon
that my poor friend the maniac of Ord lost her life a few days after.

I found my companion in charge of the cart with our tools, baiting at an
inn a little beyond Contin;