Therefore, if you object, I object. Now, excellent Boythorn, let us go to dinner!’”
“But, excellent Boythorn might say,” returned our host, swelling and growing very red, “I'll be———”
“I understand,” said Mr. Skimpole. “Very likely he would.”
“———if I will go to dinner!” cried Mr. Boythorn, in a violent burst, and stopping to strike his stick upon the ground. “And he would probably add,“Is there such a thing as principle, Mr. Harold Skimpole?’”
“To which Harold Skimpole would reply, you know,” he returned in his gayest manner, and with his most ingenuous smile, “‘Upon my life I have not the least idea! I don't know what it is you call by that name, or where it is, or who possesses it. If you possess it and find it comfortable, I am quite delighted, and congratulate you heartily. But I know nothing about it, I assure you; for I am a mere child, and I lay no claim to it, and I don't want it!’ So, you see, excellent Boythorn and I would go to dinner after all!”
This was one of many little dialogues between them, which I always expected to end, and which I dare say would have ended under other circumstances, in some violent explosion on the part of our host. But, he had so high a sense of his hospitable and responsible position as our entertainer, and my guardian laughed so sincerely at and with Mr. Skimpole, as a child who blew bubbles and broke them all day long, that matters never went beyond this point. Mr. Skimpole, who always seemed quite unconscious of having been on delicate ground, then betook himself to beginning some sketch in the park which he never finished, or to playing fragments of airs on the piano, or to singing scraps of songs, or to lying down on his back under a tree, and looking at the sky—which he couldn't help thinking, he said, was what he was meant for; it suited him so exactly.
“Enterprise and effort,” he would say to us (on his back), “are delightful to me. I believe I am truly cosmopolitan. I have the deepest sympathy with them. I lie in a shady place like this, and think of adventurous spirits going to the North Pole, or penetrating to the heart of the Torrid Zone, with admiration. Mercenary creatures ask, ‘What is the use of a man's going to the North Pole? What good does it do?’ I can't say; but, for anything I can say, he may go for the purpose—though he don't know it—of employing my thoughts as I lie here. Take an extreme case. Take the case of the Slaves on American plantations. I dare say they are worked hard, I dare say they don't altogether like it, I dare say theirs is an unpleasant experience on the whole; but, they people the landscape for me, they give it a poetry for me, and perhaps that is one of the pleasanter objects of their existence. I am very sensible of it, if it be, and I shouldn't wonder if it were!”
I always wondered on these occasions whether he ever thought of Mrs. Skimpole and the children, and in what point of view they presented themselves to his cosmopolitan mind. So far as I could understand, they rarely presented themselves at all.
The week had gone round to the Saturday following that beating of my heart in the church; and every day had been so bright and blue, that to ramble in the woods, and to see the light striking down among the transparent leaves, and sparkling in the beautiful interlacings of the
