Off we went at a furious pace.  Saddlebank’s goose was reverted to by both of us with an exchange of assurances that we should meet a dish the fellow to it before we slept.

‘As for life,’ said I, as soon as the sharp pace had fetched my breathing to a regular measure, ‘adventures are what I call life.’

Temple assented.  ‘They’re capital, if you only see the end of them.’

We talked of Ulysses and Penelope.  Temple blamed him for leaving Calypso.  I thought Ulysses was right, otherwise we should have had no slaying of the Suitors but Temple shyly urged that to have a Goddess caring for you (and she was handsomer than Penelope, who must have been an oldish woman) was something to make you feel as you do on a hunting morning, when there are half-a-dozen riding-habits speckling the field—­a whole glorious day your own among them!  This view appeared to me very captivating, save for an obstruction in my mind, which was, that Goddesses were always conceived by me as statues.  They talked and they moved, it was true, but the touch of them was marble; and they smiled and frowned, but they had no variety they were never warm.

‘If I thought that!’ muttered Temple, puffing at the raw fog.  He admitted he had thought just the contrary, and that the cold had suggested to him the absurdity of leaving a Goddess.

‘Look here, Temple,’ said I, ’has it never struck you?  I won’t say I’m like him.  It’s true I’ve always admired Ulysses; he could fight best, talk best, and plough, and box, and how clever he was!  Take him all round, who wouldn’t rather have had him for a father than Achilles?  And there were just as many women in love with him.’

‘More,’ said Temple.

‘Well, then,’ I continued, thanking him in my heart, for it must have cost him something to let Ulysses be set above Achilles, ’Telemachus is the one I mean.  He was in search of his father.  He found him at last.  Upon my honour, Temple, when I think of it, I ’m ashamed to have waited so long.  I call that luxury I’ve lived in senseless.  Yes! while I was uncertain whether my father had enough to eat or not.’

‘I say! hush!’ Temple breathed, in pain at such allusions.  ’Richie, the squire has finished his bottle by about now; bottle number two.  He won’t miss us till the morning, but Miss Beltham will.  She’ll be at your bedroom door three or four times in the night, I know.  It’s getting darker and darker, we must be in some dreadful part of London.’

The contrast he presented to my sensations between our pleasant home and this foggy solitude gave me a pang of dismay.  I diverged from my favourite straight line, which seemed to pierce into the bowels of the earth, sharp to the right.  Soon or late after, I cannot tell, we were in the midst of a thin stream of people, mostly composed of boys and young women, going at double time, hooting and screaming with the delight of loosened animals, not quite so