"Did they put it in their mouths—where you have it, Father?" enquired Anthony, who was hanging on my words and on the back of my seat.
"Suppose you shut yours," I replied, with the brutality that is the only effective defence against the frontal attacks of the young.
We found the yard at Harrington's thronged with a shabby company of carts, cars, and traps of many varieties; donkey-carts had made their own of the road outside, even the small circle of gravel in front of the hall door was bordered by bicycles; apparently an auction was a fashionable function in the region of the Lug-na-Coppal copper-mines. Dingy backs bulged from the open door of the hall, and over their heads as we arrived floated the voice of the auctioneer, demanding in tragic incredulity if people thought his conscience would permit him to let an aneroid barometer go for half-a-crown. Without a word Philippa inserted herself between the backs, followed by her son, and was lost to view.
"Thank you, madam!" said the voice, with a new note of cheer in it. "Five shillings I am bid! Any advance on five shillings?"
"That's a good weather-glass!" hissed a farmer's daughter with a plumed hat, to a friend with a black shawl over her head. "An' I coming into the house to-day I gave it a puck, and it knocked a lep out o' the needle. It's in grand working order."
"I'm told it was the last thing in the house poor Mr. Harrington left a hand on, the day he made away with himself, the Lord save us!" remarked a large matron, casually, to Andrew and me.
"I thought the Coroner's Jury found that he fell down the shaft?" I returned, accepting the conversational opening in the spirit in which it was offered.
The matron winked at me with a mixture of compassion and confederacy.
"Ah, the poor fellow was insured, and the jury were decent men, they wouldn't wish to have anything said that 'd put the wife out of the money."
"The right men in the right place, evidently," said Andrew, who rather fancies his dry humour. "But apart from the climate and the architecture, was there any reason for suicide?"