The crocodile jibbed and tried to kick, but
vainly. He was no more able to throw the squire than Sinbad was to
throw the old scoundrel who used his back without paying for it, until
he discovered a mode (slightly immoral, perhaps, though some think not)
of murdering the old fraudulent jockey, and so circuitously of
unhorsing him.] changed the relations between the animals. The mode of
escaping from the reptile he showed to be not by running away, but by
leaping on its back booted and spurred. The two animals had
misunderstood each other. The use of the crocodile has now been cleared
up--viz., to be ridden; and the final cause of man is that he may
improve the health of the crocodile by riding him a-fox-hunting before
breakfast. And it is pretty certain that any crocodile who has been
regularly hunted through the season, and is master of the weight he
carries, will take a six-barred gate now as well as ever he would have
done in the infancy of the pyramids.
If, therefore, the crocodile does _not_ change, all things else
undeniably _do_: even the shadow of the pyramids grows less. And
often the restoration in vision of Fanny and the Bath road makes me too
pathetically sensible of that truth. Out of the darkness, if I happen
to call back the image of Fanny, up rises suddenly from a gulf of forty
years a rose in June; or, if I think for an instant of the rose in
June, up rises the heavenly face of Fanny.
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