A TERRIFYING GOOD WISH
To digress once more: Loki’s Grandfather is no doubt a man of fine proportions; though he is not at all plump, he has all the athlete’s dread of becoming so. Once when we were stranded at a small wayside station in Ireland, without even a bench to sit upon, he began to while away the time by testing his weight on the automatic machine. The indicating needle travelled considerably further than he expected! He was standing, transfixed, staring at the pointing finger, when a very old woman with a shawl over her head, holding a very small boy by the hand, suddenly broke into loud paeans beside him:
“God bless your honour!—Isn’t it the grand gentleman you are! Glory be to God, may you grow larger, and larger, and larger!”
“For heaven’s sake,” cried Loki’s Grandfather, wheeling round in horror, “don’t say such a thing!”
“And indeed I do, yer honour.—Look at him now,” she went on, shaking the little creature she held by the hand, “you’ll never see a finer gentleman. Don’t you wish you had a Dada like that?”
Then she burst out again and continued to wish him increase in Sybilline tones. They were both so extraordinarily serious, she in her benisons, he in his terror of the curse, that as Loki’s Grandmother sat on her trunk she was weak with laughter.
A LOCAL POET
The Master of the Villino had a charming little experience last spring. Some time before, in the winter, he fell into conversation with an old sweep, who was tramping up the hill, the evidence of his life-work thick upon him. They discoursed of many things, for the sweep had a wide range of interests. They spoke of the moorland place as it was in bygone days; and of the learned Professor whose eulogies first put it into fashion; of the lectures on Science delivered by this latter; and of the way in which the spring first shows itself in the lower copses while it is still winter on our heights. The sweep knew a dell where the primroses were always a month in advance of any other spot. He had a soul for primroses, unlike Wordsworth’s horrible Peter—which reminds me of the delicious remark made to Loki’s young mistress by an old pensioner in Chelsea Gardens. He led her to the plot he cultivated for himself, with all the childish eagerness of the aged, and pointed to a single yellow crocus, blown this way and that by the wind, for it was a shrewish day. “Look at it, Missie!” he cried. “It’s as playful as a kitten.”
