a sudden flutter in the breast of buds; and streams
(having sent their broken anger to the sea) were pleased to be murmuring
clearly again, and enjoyed their own flexibility; and even stern
mountains and menacing crags allowed soft light to play with them--at
such a time prudence found very narrow house-room in the breast of young
Lancelot, otherwise "Pet."

"If Prudence be present, no Divinity is absent," according to high
authority; but the author of the proverb must have first excluded Love
from the list of Divinities. Pet's breast, or at any rate his chest, had
grown under the expansive enormity of love; his liver, moreover (which,
according to poets, both Latin and Greek, is the especial throne of
love), had quickened its proceedings, from the exercise he took; from
the same cause, his calves increased so largely that even Jordas could
not pull the agate buttons of his gaiters through their holes. In a
word, he gained flesh, muscle, bone, and digestion, and other great
bodily blessings, from the power believed by the poets to upset
and annihilate every one of them. However, this proves nothing
anti-poetical, for the essence of that youth was to contradict
experience.

Jordas had never, in all his born days, not even in the thick of the
snow-drift, found himself more in a puzzle than now; and he could not
even fly for advice in this matter to Lawyer Jellicorse. The first great
gift of nature, expelled by education, is gratitude. A child is full
of gratitude, or at least has got the room for it; but no full-grown
mortal, after good education, has been known to keep the rudiments of
thankfulness. But Jordas had a stock of it--as much as can remain to any
one superior to the making of a cross.

Now the difficulty of it was that Jordas called to mind, every morning
when he saw snow, and afterward when he saw anything white, that he must
have required a grave, and not got it (in time to be any good to him),
without the hard labor, strong endurance, and brotherly tendance of
the people of the gill. Even the three grand fairy gifts of Lawyer
Jellicorse himself might scarcely have saved him, although they were no
less than as follows, in virtue: the tip of a tongue that had never told
a lie (because it belonged to a bullock slain young), a flask of old
Scotch whiskey, and a horn comfit-box of Irish snuff. All these three
had stood him in good stead, especially the last, which kept him
wide-awake, and enabled him to sneez