A Thumb-Nail Sketch of a Lady

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

THOUGH her master the Vicar, ever dreaming of the Middle Ages, loves to play that she is a Wild Boar, she is only a Pig of beauty, manners, and pedigree. She inhabits a suite of private lodgings, but prefers a spacious green field, “ primrosed, and hung with shade,” where her friendship with the children’s adored donkey is good to see. What conversation they hold is always under the rose, laconic, patrician ; she standing, with animated nostrils, by his tall knee. Every hair of her is pure silver-gray, with reddish lights, and burnished, immaculate, as befits one who strolls all morning in the dew, and breakfasts on new milk and Marasmus oreades.

On my walks I love to look in upon her, for Dowsabella is cheerful as well as comely; and when she proffers her shapely jowl, like a prettily behaved dog, for a passing caress, one cannot but feel privileged. She is never backward, as our country folk say, in passing the time o’ day. The Vicar maintains that her Latin is the real thing; not hog Latin at all. To prove it, he will tell you a little tale against himself. It would appear that my dear antiquary, forever mousing in historic ground, once found, in a season of great drought, on that bank of the river which was not his bank, but a rival archæologist’s, a broken but beautifully carven little sandstone boss. He knew perfectly what it came from, and crowed to himself as he fished it out of the mud. On the way home, composing an inscription fit to be cut on a tiny brass and inlaid at the back of his thirteenth-century conventual relic, the Vicar, crossing the stile into Dowsabella’s clover park, sat down, and took out his notebook and pencil. “ Domus olim gloriosæ,” he began slowly to write, enjoying his own string of open vowels, “ hunc lapidem mutilatum pie conservavit Ronaldus Luff, clericus, anno salutis MCMI.” He paused, thinking that he had better fill in the name of the priory in the form in which it occurs in the chartulary, when up came his pet, sniffing at the wet stone, — wet in a month of no rain. “ Hunc ? hunc ? ” queried she, eyeing her Vicar. “ Sane quidem ! ” he replied gayly “ What is the matter with hunc ? Don’t be hypercritical, don’t be silly.” Hunc was a mere ruse, as they both knew. The commentator returned to the charge. “ Conservavit? ” she drawled, with awful distinctness. The Vicar wishes you to know that her pronunciation, unlike his own usage, is modern to a degree; something in this style, “ Conk-sare-wah’weet ? ” —a significant, a satiric word. Now the scholar of the first part quailed. He drew his breath, looked away from the Wild Boar, pulled his linen hat down a bit, and scored a big black line through his nice verb. What he wrote over it was surrepsit. Then he laughed out. “ You know too much, Dowsabella,” he said. “ Now go preach to your donkey.”