He remembered no mention of the weaver
between them since the time, twelve years ago, when it was their
boyish sport to deride him; and, besides, his imagination constantly
created an alibi for Dunstan: he saw him continually in some congenial
haunt, to which he had walked off on leaving Wildfire- saw him
sponging on chance acquaintances, and meditating a return home to
the old amusement of tormenting his elder brother. Even if any brain
in Raveloe had put the said two facts together, I doubt whether a
combination so injurious to the prescriptive respectability of a
family with a mural monument and venerable tankards, would not have
been suppressed as of unsound tendency. But Christmas puddings, brawn,
and abundance of spirituous liquors, throwing the mental originality
into the channel of nightmare, are great preservatives against a
dangerous spontaneity of waking thought.
When the robbery was talked of at the Rainbow and elsewhere, in
good company, the balance continued to waver between the rational
explanation founded on the tinder-box, and the theory of an
impenetrable mystery that mocked investigation. The advocates of the
tinder-box-and-pedlar view considered the other side a muddle-headed
and credulous set, who, because they themselves were wall-eyed,
supposed everybody else to have the same blank outlook; and the
adherents of the inexplicable, more than hinted that their antagonists
were animals inclined to crow before they had found any corn- mere
skimming-dishes in point of depth- whose clear-sightedness consisted
in supposing there was nothing behind a barn-door because they
couldn't see through it; so that, though their controversy did not
serve to elicit the fact concerning the robbery, it elicited some true
opinions of collateral importance.
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