RAMBLING ROUND EVELYN
But now and again the sight of a vanishing coat-tail suggests more than a whole figure sitting still in a full light. They have struck no attitude, arranged no mantle. Little they think that for three hundred years and more they will be looked at in the act of jumping a gate, or observing, like the old Marquis of Argyle, that the turtle doves in the aviary are owls. Our eyes wander from one to the other; our affections settle here or there—on hot-tempered Captain Wray, for instance, who was choleric, had a dog that killed a goat, was for shooting the goat’s owner, was for shooting his horse when it fell down a precipice; on Mr. Saladine; on Mr. Saladine’s beautiful daughter; on Captain Wray lingering at Geneva to make love to Mr. Saladine’s daughter; on Evelyn himself most of all, grown old, walking in his garden at Wooton, his sorrows smoothed out, his grandson doing him credit, the Latin quotations falling pat from his lips, his trees flourishing, and the butterflies flying and flaunting on his dahlias too.
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