EUPHEMIA CLASHTHOUGHT[10]

AN IMITATION OF MEREDITH

[Footnote 10:  It were not, as a general rule, well to republish after
  a man’s death the skit you made of his work while he lived.  Meredith,
  however, was so transcendent that such skits must ever be harmless,
  and so lasting will his fame be that they can never lose what
  freshness they may have had at first.  So I have put this thing in
  with the others, making improvements that were needed.—­M.B.]

In the heart of insular Cosmos, remote by some scores of leagues of Hodge-trod arable or pastoral, not more than a snuff-pinch for gaping tourist nostrils accustomed to inhalation of prairie winds, but enough for perspective, from those marginal sands, trident-scraped, we are to fancy, by a helmeted Dame Abstract familiarly profiled on discs of current bronze—­price of a loaf for humbler maws disdainful of Gallic side-dishes for the titillation of choicer palates—­stands Clashthought Park, a house of some pretension, mentioned at Runnymede, with the spreading exception of wings given to it in later times by Daedalean masters not to be baulked of billiards or traps for Terpsichore, and owned for unbroken generations by a healthy line of procreant Clashthoughts, to the undoing of collateral branches eager for the birth of a female.  Passengers through cushioned space, flying top-speed or dallying with obscure stations not alighted at apparently, have had it pointed out to them as beheld dimly for a privileged instant before they sink back behind crackling barrier of instructive paper with a “Thank you, Sir,” or “Madam,” as the case may be.  Guide-books praise it.  I conceive they shall be studied for a cock-shy of rainbow epithets slashed in at the target of Landed Gentry, premonitorily.  The tintinnabulation’s enough.  Periodical footings of Clashthoughts into Mayfair or the Tyrol, signalled by the slide from its mast of a crested index of Aeolian caprice, blazon of their presence, give the curious a right to spin through the halls and galleries under a cackle of housekeeper guideship—­scramble for a chuck of the dainties, dog fashion.  There is something to be said for the rope’s twist.  Wisdom skips.

It is recorded that the goblins of this same Lady Wisdom were all agog one Christmas morning between the doors of the house and the village church, which crouches on the outskirt of the park, with something of a lodge in its look, you might say, more than of celestial twinkles, even with Christmas hoar-frost bleaching the grey of it in sunlight, as one sees imaged on seasonable missives for amity in the trays marked “sixpence and upwards,” here and there, on the counters of barter.

Be sure these goblins made obeisance to Sir Peter Clashthought, as he passed by, starched beacon of squirearchy, wife on arm, sons to heel.  After him, certain members of the household—­rose-chapped males and females, bearing books of worship.  The pack of goblins glance up the drive with nudging elbows and whisperings of “Where is daughter Euphemia?  Where Sir Rebus, her affianced?”