And heaving and sliding
and rearing and pawing and most vigorously wrestling with the clerical
and hierarchically constraining garment of darkness, and bleating all
the while more and more angrily and loudly, for all the world like the
great goat Baphomet himself when the witches dance about him on
All-hallowe'en. But when the boy suddenly plucked off the cassock
again, the lamb, after sneezing a little and finding his feet, became
quite gentle once more, and looked only a little confused and dazed.
'There, father,' said the boy, 'is proof to you of how the meekest may
be driven to desperation by the shackles I speak of, and which I pray
you never lay upon me again.'
His father finding him so practical and wise made over his whole
fortune and business to him, and thus escaped the very heavy Heriot
and Death Dues of those days, for he was a Socage tenant of St Remi in
Double Burgage. But we stopped all that here in England by the statute
of Uses, and I must be getting back to the road before the dark
catches me.
As I was saying, I came to a gap in the hills, and there was there a
house or two called Gansbrunnen, and one of the houses was an inn.
Just by the inn the road turned away sharply up the valley; the very
last slope of the Jura, the last parallel ridge, lay straight before
me all solemn, dark, and wooded, and making a high feathery line
against the noon.
