“With laughing mouth but tear-wet eye.”
There came a day when Phyl and Dolly dashed in from the Post-office with scarlet faces. There had been among the letters one with a queer German stamp upon it, and, secure in a deserted road, they had raced each other home as if they had still been in short frocks.
The news spread round the house, and the family gathered rapidly together from orchard, garden, and verandahs, for this was the boy’s first letter since his feet had touched on German soil.
In the hall impish Davey lingered with wistful eyes to catch a word or two, and out in the kitchen Mary said, “Bless the little chap!” and looked affectionately at a patch of ink he had one time spilt on her spotless dresser.
[254]
]“Wiesbaden,
“Jan. the something or other.
“Hello the all of you” (the letter ran),
“And how’s things out there? I expect you are all roasting. Well, I’m not, and that’s a fact. Cold! Why, if I put my nose outside this morning it would never come in again, the wind snaps so, and I’d have a beard of icicles and a snow moustache in five jiffys. Did you get my other letter? I posted two of them at places we stopped at, I forgot the blessed names,—oh! one of them was in the Sandwich Islands, I remember that, because a fellow stuffed me there were natural sandwiches there growing on the Bread-fruit Palms. I never get taken in now though; you can’t help it at first, everything’s so queer. Then I posted again—only I didn’t put a stamp on, at the place we left the ship,—I forget the name, but it’s in Italy. You got it, didn’t you? Old Ollendorf’s a rummy fellow; [we went to a town] called Rome (it’s in Italy too, not far from that other town), and he poked about all day among the smashed-up places. He gets tears in his eyes and blows his nose hard whenever he gets excited, and he gets excited over everything. Well, the more smashed-up a place was the more he’d cry. While we were in that town he was crying most of the time. I got tired of it, so I left him saying ‘Ach Gott’ and ‘Himmel’ and such things in front of a lot of dirty old pictures, and young Clinch and me went to a circus. Mein vord, it [255] ]was a circus. They’d kick such a thing out of Australia, but anything does for these old Rome people.
“[We went to a town called Rome.]”
“Well, then, we went to another place, I forget the name—oh, Florence, I think. Didn’t think much of it, but it’s not quite so tumble-down as the what’s-it’s-name town. Oh, I didn’t tell you about the river at the other place. Old Olly had spouted about it, the Tiber it’s called, all the way in the train, and I really thought I was going to see something at last. Well, when we’d had something to eat, he carted me out on to a bridge to look at it. I give you my word I [256] ]thought he was having a lark with me. The dirtiest, miserablest bit of a river you ever saw. I didn’t want to catch typhoid, so I held my nose and turned round to see if he was holding his. But he wasn’t. He was blowing it hard and crying. Yes, by Shimminy. I told him he just ought to see our Hawkesbury.