“Rise, Lubin, rise, and twitch thy mantle blue;
          To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

“Oh, do help me to screw on my leg.  That’s it.  I say, it’s a quarter-past one!  We must hurry up, or Aunt Charlotte will be cursing.  What does it matter if one eats at half-past one or at a quarter to two?  I really am very fond of Aunt Charlotte, you know, though I find it awfully difficult to educate her.  I sometimes despair of ever being able to bring her up properly at all, she is so hopelessly Early Victorian, poor thing.  But, then, so many people are, aren’t they?  Now animals are never Early Victorian; that’s why I respect them so.  If you weren’t a human being, Lubin—­and a very nice one, as you are—­what sort of an animal would you like to be?”

“Well, I don’t rightly know as I ever considered the point,” said Lubin, passing his fingers through his drenched curls.  “Perhaps I’d as lief be a squirrel as anything.  I’m awfully fond o’ nuts, and when I was a kid I used to spend half my time a-climbing trees.  A squirrel must have rather a jolly life of it, when one comes to think.”

“What a splendid idea!” cried Austin, as they prepared to start.  “You are clever, Lubin.  It would be lovely to live in a tree, curtained all round with thousands of quivering green leaves.  I wish I knew what animals think about all day.  It must be very dull for them never to have any thoughts, poor dears, and yet they seem happy enough somehow.  Perhaps they have something else instead to make up for it—­something that we’ve no idea of.  I say—­it’s half-past one!”

So Austin was late for lunch after all, and got a scolding from Aunt Charlotte, who told him that it was exceedingly ill-bred to inconvenience other people by habitual unpunctuality.  Austin was very penitent, and promised he’d never be unpunctual again if he lived to be a hundred.  Then Aunt Charlotte was mollified, and regaled him with an improving account of a most excellent book she had just been reading, upon the importance of instilling sound principles of political economy into the mind of the agricultural labourer.  It was so essential, she explained, that people in that position should understand something about the laws which govern prices, the relations of capital and labour, the metayer system, and the ratio which should exist between an increase of population and the exhaustion of the soil by too frequent crops of wheat; and she wound up by propounding a series of hypothetical problems based on the doctrines she had set forth, for Austin to solve offhand.