"Ride away, sir, ride away," said the farmer, who had better not have
measured swords with Mordacks. "I were thinking of sending a cart over
there, so soon as the weather should be opening of the roads up. But
the children might be hankerin' after meat, the worse for all the
snow-time."

"It is almost impossible to imagine such a thing. Universally respected,
suddenly cut off, enormous family with hereditary hunger, all the
neighbors well aware of straitened circumstances, the kindest-hearted
county in Great Britain--sorrow and abundance must have cloyed their
appetites, as at a wealthy man's funeral. What a fool I must have been
not to foresee all that!"

"Better see than foresee," replied the farmer, who was crusty from
remembering that he had done nothing. "Neighbors likes to wait for
neighbors to go in; same as two cows staring at a new-mown meadow."

CHAPTER XLIV

THE WAY OF THE WORLD

Cliffs snow-mantled, and storm-ploughed sands, and dark gray billows
frilled with white, rolling and roaring to the shrill east wind, made
the bay of Bridlington a very different sight from the smooth fair
scene of August. Scarcely could the staggering colliers, anchored under
Flamborough Head (which they gladly would have rounded if they could),
hold their own against wind and sea, although the outer spit of sand
tempered as yet the full violence of waves.

But if everything looked cold and dreary, rough, and hard, and bare
of beauty, the cottage of the late lieutenant, standing on the shallow
bluff, beaten by the wind, and blinded of its windows from within, of
all things looked the most forlorn, most desolate, and freezing. The
windward side was piled with snow, on the crest of which foam pellets
lay, looking yellow by comparison, and melting small holes with their
brine. At the door no foot-mark broke the drift; and against the
vaporous sky no warmer vapor tufted the chimney-pots.

"I am pretty nearly frozen again," said Mordacks; "but that place sends
another shiver down my back. All the poor little devils must be icicles
at least."

After peeping through a blind, he turned pale betwixt his blueness, and
galloped to the public-house abutting on the quay. Here he marched into
the parlor, and stamped about, till a merry-looking landlord came to
him. "Have a glass of hot, sir; how blue your nose is!" the genial
master said to him. The reply of the factor can not be written down in
these days of noble language. Enou