you. How long have you been
holding me on?"

"All in the day's work." He gave him back the reins.

"Where's that round hill?"

"Gone where the good niggers go. I want a drink."

This is Nature's joke in Wiltshire--her one joke. You toil on windy
slopes, and feel very primeval. You are miles from your fellows, and lo!
a little valley full of elms and cottages. Before Rickie had waked up to
it, they had stopped by a thatched public-house, and Stephen was yelling
like a maniac for beer.

There was no occasion to yell. He was not very thirsty, and they were
quite ready to serve him. Nor need he have drunk in the saddle, with the
air of a warrior who carries important dispatches and has not the time
to dismount. A real soldier, bound on a similar errand, rode up to the
inn, and Stephen feared that he would yell louder, and was hostile. But
they made friends and treated each other, and slanged the proprietor and
ragged the pretty girls; while Rickie, as each wave of vulgarity burst
over him, sunk his head lower and lower, and wished that the earth
would swallow him up. He was only used to Cambridge, and to a very small
corner of that. He and his friends there believed in free speech.
But they spoke freely about generalities. They were scientific and
philosophic. They would have shrunk from the empirical freedom that
results from a little beer.

That was what annoyed him as he rode down the new valley with two
chattering companions. He was more skilled than they were in the
principles of human existence, but he was not so indecently familiar
with the examples. A sordid village scandal--such as Stephen described
as a huge joke--sprang from certain defects in human nature, with which
he was theoretically acquainted. But the example! He blushed at it like
a maiden lady, in spite of its having a parallel in a beautiful idyll of
Theocritus. Was experience going to be such a splendid thing after all?
Were the outside of houses so very beautiful?

"That's spicy!" the soldier was saying. "Got any more like that?"

"I'se got a pome," said Stephen, and drew a piece of paper from his
pocket. The valley had broadened. Old Sarum rose before them, ugly and
majestic.

"Write this yourself?" he asked, chuckling.

"Rather," said Stephen, lowering his head and kissing Aeneas between the
ears.

"But who's old Em'ly?" Rickie winced and frowned.

"Now you're asking.

"Old Em'ly she limps, And as--"

"I am so tired," said Rickie.