'It is high time, certainly,' said Edmund; 'our Church is almost a disgrace to us, especially with the Arundel aisle, to show what our ancestors did.'
'No, not quite to us,' said Marian; 'you know papa would have done it all long ago, if the idea had not vexed poor old Mr. May so much. But Ranger! Ranger! where is Ranger, Edmund?'
Edmund whistled, and presently, with whirring, rushing wing, there flew over the hedge beside them a covey of partridges, followed by Ranger's eager bark. Marian's pony started, danced, and capered; Edmund watched her with considerable anxiety, but she reined it in with a steady, dexterous, though not a strong hand, kept her seat well, and rode on in triumph, while Edmund exclaimed, 'Capital, Marian!' Then looking back, 'What a shot that was!' he added in a sort of parenthesis, continuing, 'I am proud, Mayflower is not a bit too much for you now, though I think we must have given her up if you had had another tumble.'
'Oh, no, no, I do so delight in Mayflower, pretty creature!' said Marian, patting her neck. 'I like to feel that the creature I ride is alive--not an old slug, like that animal which you are upon, Edmund.'
'That is decidedly ungrateful of you, Marian, when you learnt to ride upon this identical slug, and owe the safety of your neck to its quiet propensities. Now take care down this stony hill; hold her up well--that is right.'
Care was certainly needed as they descended the steep hill side; the road, or rather pathway, cut out between high, steep, limestone rocks, and here and there even bare of earth. Any one but a native would have trembled at such a descent but though the cousins paid attention to their progress, they had no doubts or alarms. At the bottom a clear sparkling stream traversed the road, where, for the convenience of foot passengers, a huge flat stone had been thrown across from one high bank to the other, so as to form a romantic bridge. Marian, however, did not avail herself of it, but rode gallantly through the shallow water, only looking back at it to observe to Edmund, 'We must make a sketch of that some day or other.'
'I am afraid we cannot get far enough off,' said Edmund, 'to make a good drawing of it. Too many things go to the making of the picturesque.'
'Yes, I know, but that is what I never can understand. I see by woeful experience that what is pretty in itself will not make a pretty drawing, and everyone says so; but I never could find out why.'
'Perhaps because we cannot represent it adequately.'
'Yes, but there is another puzzle; you sometimes see an exact representation, which is not really a picture at all. Don't you know that thing that the man who came to the door did of our house,--the trees all green, and the sky all blue, and the moors all purple?'
'As like as it can stare; yes, I know.'
'Well, why does that not satisfy us? why is it not a picture?'
'Because it stares, I suppose. Why does not that picture of my aunt at Mrs. Week's cottage satisfy you as well as the chalk sketch in the dining-room?'
'Because it has none of herself--her spirit.'
'Well, I should say that nature has a self and a spirit which must be caught, or else the Chinese would be the greatest artists on the face of the earth.'
'Yes, but why does an archway, or two trees standing up so as to enclose the landscape, or--or any of those things that do to put in the foreground, why do they enable you to make a picture, to catch this self and spirit.'
'Make the phial to enclose the genie,' said Edmund. 'Abstruse questions, Marian; but perhaps it is because they contract the space, so as to bring it more to the level of our capacity, make it less grand, and more what we can get into keeping. To be sure, he would be a presumptuous man who tried to make an exact likeness of that,' he added, as they reached the top of the hill, and found themselves on an open common, with here and there a mass of rock peeping up, but for the most part covered with purple heath and short furze, through which Ranger coursed, barking joyously. The view was splendid, on one side the moors rising one
