But there are two men upon that mountain, whom neither rock nor rain, storm nor thunder have conquered, because they are simply brave honest men; and who are, perhaps, far more “poetic” 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, “the jolliest lark they ever had in their lives.”

“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—­” for darkness cut the speech short.

“Where be you, William? says the keeper.”

“Here I be, sir, says the beater, with my ’eels above my ’ed.”

“Wery well, William; when you get your ’ed above your ’eels, gae on.”

“But I’m stuck fast between two stones!  Hang the stones!” And Naylor bursts into an old seventeenth century ditty of the days of “three-man glees.”

  “They stoans, they stoans, they stoans, they stoans—­
  They stoans that built George Riddler’s oven,
  O they was fetched from Blakeney quarr’;
  And George he was a jolly old man,
  And his head did grow above his har’.

  “One thing in George Riddler I must commend,
  And I hold it for a valiant thing;
  With any three brothers in Gloucestershire
  He swore that his three sons should sing.

  “There was Dick the tribble, and Tom the mane,
  Let every man sing in his own place;
  And William he was the eldest brother,
  And therefore he should sing the base.—­

I’m down again!  This is my thirteenth fall.”

“So am I!  I shall just lie and light a pipe.”

“Come on, now, and look round the lee side of this crag.  We shall find him bundled up under the lee of one of them.”

“He don’t know lee from windward, I dare say.”  “He’ll soon find out the difference by his skin;—­if it’s half as wet, at least, as mine is.”

“I’ll tell you what, Naylor, if the poor fellow has crossed the ridge, and tried to go down on the Twll du, he’s a dead man by this time.”

“He’ll have funked it, when he comes to the edge, and sees nothing but mist below.  But if he has wandered on to the cliffs above Trifaen, he’s a dead man, then, at all events.  Get out of the way of that flash!  A close shave, that!  I believe my whiskers are singed.”