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The Pirate Of Masafuero
by
CHAPTER III.
Orlando.
Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind.
Jaques. Nay then, God be wi’ you an you talk in blank verse.
AS YOU LIKE IT.
Our scene must now change somewhat abruptly from the shores of the Pacific to a very different part of this watery ball.
Great and manifold are the advantages that an author enjoys over his readers; for, however anxious those readers may be to arrive at the end of the story, they must either close the book with a “Pish!” or a “Pshaw!” or condescend to follow him, and resignedly await his leisure. He leads them where he pleases and at what pace he pleases; they must follow him: they are like passengers on board a packet beating into port with what sailors call “a good working breeze;” at one moment they seem to have almost reached the anchorage, when suddenly the skipper shouts “Helm’s a-lee,” the vessel heaves in stays and makes a long “stretch” off, till the spires and roofs of the wished-for haven seem fading away in the hazy distance.
The celebrated Hugh Peters, one of Cromwell’s fanatical preachers, explaining to his audience why God was forty years leading the children of Israel through the wilderness, which was not more than forty days’ march across, made a circumflex with his finger upon his pulpit cushion, and said, “he led them crinkledum cum crankledum,” I do not intend that my story shall make more “Virginia fence” than is absolutely necessary; but that it shall proceed, like a law-suit, “with deliberate speed.”
In the vicinity of one of those beautiful villages that surround the great commercial city of Bristol, and upon the banks of the lovely Severn, stood the residence of a wealthy merchant. There was nothing about the house or grounds that denoted the occupant or owner to be of a mercantile turn; for there certainly is, very generally, something about merchants’ houses that is prim and starch–something precise and formal about them, as though they had been planned according to the “Golden Rule of Three,” and executed with reference to the multiplication table. It is a most melancholy fact, that the close, confined air of a counting-room is deadly poison to a taste for the fine arts, and, but too often, to every thing like liberality of feeling.
Effingham House was neither planned nor executed upon a grand or a mean scale; there was nothing extravagant or penurious, vast or contracted, about it; but it presented a happy combination of the comfortable, the elegant, and the neat. Such houses are very common indeed throughout New England; in the old country there is a constant repetition of the fable of the frog and the ox–the wealthy cit endeavoring to equal the haughty splendors of the nobleman.
The villa that we describe fronted upon a large and beautiful lawn, that gradually sloped towards the river, of which, and the lovely scenery beyond it, it commanded an enchanting view, and was spotted with noble oaks and elms, that appeared to have stood ever since the Conquest, or might, perhaps, have overshadowed the legions of Agricola. A carriage path, well gravelled and kept perfectly free from dirt and weeds, wound around among these primeval trees, occasionally emerging from their shade, as if to give the approaching stranger an opportunity to view every part of the delightful landscape.
Along this path a horseman was seen riding, one lovely afternoon in September. The air of the rider was that of a man to whom the scene was perfectly familiar, but who seemed busy with thoughts that made him inattentive to its beauties. His sunburnt countenance, and an indescribable something in his whole appearance, that the experienced eye of a member of the same fraternity only could discern, announced that he was one of those that “followed the seas.”