“Oh, it will be better soon, sir,” said the second boy cheerfully. “There’ll be a heavy rain, the river will fill again, and the fish begin running up from the sea. It’s such a lovely morning out, and the flowers are glorious.”
“Yes, Ned, lovely and glorious,” said the penman sadly. “It is, as I have often said, a perfect paradise—a beautiful garden. I don’t wonder that the old mission fathers called it the Valley of the Angels. But though we can drink in the beauty of the place it does not quench one’s thirst, and not being herbivorous people, we can’t feed on flowers. Oh dear! Then there are no fish?”
“Not till the rains come, fa.”
“And when they do come the wet will find it easy to get to your skin, Chris—and to yours too, Ned Bourne. What a pair of ragamuffins you look!”
The two frank, good-looking lads coloured through their bronzed skins, and each involuntarily clapped his hand to a guilty spot—that is to say, one covered a triangular hole in his knickerbockers and the other pressed together the sides of a long slit in his Norfolk jacket, and they spoke together again.
“I got hung up in the agaves, father, and the thorns catch like hooks.”
“A nail ran into my knicks, sir, when I was on the roof mending the shingles.”
“A very meritorious proceeding, my dear Ned, but there are needles and thread in the chest: why didn’t you mend your knicks, as you call them? Don’t let’s degenerate into scarecrows because we are obliged to live this Robinson Crusoe-like life. It’s many years since I read that book, Chris, but if I recollect right he used not only to mend his own clothes, but make new ones out of goat-skins. ‘A stitch in time saves nine,’ boys, so mend your ways—I mean the open ways where the wind and rain get in. See anything of your father, Ned?”
“Yes, sir; he’s working away with Mr Wilton up in the far orange-grove.”
“Far orange-grove,” repeated Christopher Lee’s father bitterly; “a grove without oranges. Is the blight—the scale, I mean—any better up there?”