loosen him creditably. It had to be witnessed, for faith in it. He
reverenced our legendary good women, and he bowed to noble deeds; and he
ascribed the former to poetical creativeness, the latter operated as a
scourging to his flesh to yield its demoniacal inmates. Nothing of the
kind was doing at present.

Or stay: a studious re-perusal of Gower Woodseer's letter enriched a
little incident. Fleetwood gave his wife her name of Carinthia when he
had read deliberately and caught the scene.

Mrs. Wythan down in Wales related it to Gower. Carinthia and Madge,
trudging over the treeless hills, came on a birchen clump round a deep
hollow or gullypit; precipitous, the earl knew, he had peeped over the
edge in his infant days. There at the bottom, in a foot or so of water,
they espied a lamb; and they rescued the poor beastie by going down to
it, one or both. It must have been the mountain-footed one. A man would
hesitate, spying below. Fleetwood wondered how she had managed to climb
up, and carrying the lamb! Down pitches Madge Winch to help--they did it
between them. We who stand aloof admire stupidly. To defend himself
from admiring, he condemned the two women for the risk they ran to save a
probably broken-legged little beast: and he escaped the melting mood by
forcing a sneer at the sort of stuff out of which popular ballads are
woven. Carinthia was accused of letting her adventurous impulses and
sentimental female compassion swamp thought of a mother's duties. If
both those women had broken their legs the child might have cried itself
into fits for the mother, there she would have remained.

Gower wrote in a language transparent of the act, addressed to a reader
whose memory was to be impregnated. His reader would have flown away
from the simple occurrence on arabesques and modulated tones; and then