“Geraffe? That's a beast, I'm thinking.”
“Na; it's the thing on the hill that makes signals.”
“Telegraph, ye fulish goloshen!”
“Oo ay, telegraph! Geraffe 's sunest said for a'.”
Thus Jess Rutherford's life came into Christie Johnstone's hands.
She told it to a knot of natives next day; it lost nothing, for she was a woman of feeling, and by intuition an artist of the tongue. She was the best raconteur in a place where there are a hundred, male and female, who attempt that art.
The next day she told it again, and then inferior narrators got hold of it, and it soon circulated through the town.
And this was the cause of the sudden sympathy with Jess Rutherford.
As our prigs would say:
“Art had adopted her cause and adorned her tale.”