He will prolong your life and loosen every button on
your waistcoat. Fin is the unexpected, the ever-bubbling, and the
ever-joyous; restless as a school-boy ten minutes before recess, quick
as a grasshopper and lively as a cricket. He is, besides, brimful and
spilling over with a quality of fun that is geyserlike in its
spontaneity and intermittent flow. When he laughs, which he does every
other minute, the man ploughing across the river, or the boy fishing, or
the girl driving the cow, turn their heads and smile. They can't help
it. In this respect he is better than a dozen farmers each with his two
blades of grass. Fin plants a whole acre of laughs at once.
On one of my joyous days--they were all joyous days, this one most of
all--I was up the backwater, the "Mud Lark" (Fin's name for the punt)
anchored in her element by two poles, one at each end, to keep her
steady, when Fin broke through a new aperture and became reminiscent.
I had dotted in the outlines of the old footpath with the meadows
beyond, the cotton-wool clouds sailing overhead--only in England do I
find these clouds--and was calling to the restless Irishman to sit still
or I would send him ashore .
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