human
characters at this moment than Elsley Vavasour, or any dozen of mere verse-writers, because they are hazarding their lives, on an errand of mercy, and all the while have so little notion that they are hazarding their lives, or doing anything dangerous or heroic, that, instead of being touched for a moment by Nature's melodrama, they are jesting at each other's troubles, greeting each interval of darkness with mock shouts of misery and despair, likening the crags to various fogies of their acquaintance, male and female, and only pulling the cutty pipes out of their mouths to chant snatches of jovial songs. They are Wynd and Naylor, the two Cambridge boating-men, in bedrabbled flannel trousers, and shooting-jackets pocketful of water; who are both fully agreed, that hunting a mad poet over the mountains in a thunder-storm is, on the whole,
gpt
He must have gone up here somewhere. I saw the poor beggar against the sky as plain as I see you,--which I don't--
human
Where be you, William? says the keeper.
gpt
Here I be, sir, says the beater, with my 'eels above my 'ed.
human
Wery well, William; when you get your 'ed above your 'eels, gae on.
gpt
But I'm stuck fast between two stones! Hang the stones! And Naylor bursts into an old seventeenth century ditty of the days of