“I’d sooner leave you the money.”
“Weel, put it in that drawer.”
“Well, you are a bear this morning. See here, I’ve put it in the drawer, but I’ll see you again before I go: I’m not off till to-morrow.”
“Imphim!” replied the Dour One, and Leslie went off.
Your true Scot has a very nasty habit of expressing his bad opinion of a man. He does it in a round-about way, using hints and innuendoes, instead of coming to the matter by a direct route.
What Mac suspected or what he knew, Leslie could not tell; judging from his manner, however, he knew or suspected a lot.
However, he had no time to trouble about Mac. He had one thing more to do before meeting Jane, Mr. Initogo the landlord had to be interviewed, and the rent paid.
There was a fair of a sort on in the street that formed the shortest cut to Mr. Initogo’s. It was filled with a many-colored crowd, flags were fluttering, awnings flapping in the wind; every shop had some extra advertisement to attract customers, and during the past night, like mushrooms, extra booths had sprung into being.
A roaring trade was going forward; here, all kinds of fruit, there all kinds of fish, some with bunches of violets in their mouths; cakes reposing on branches of cherry or myrtle; cakes in the form of donkeys and monkeys and goats; cakes shaped like spinning-tops; cakes in the shape of suns, moons and stars; candied beans, beans mixed with comfits, kites, masks, and paper dragons. Paper fish shaped like carp for the Little-boys’ Festival of the 5th of May.
The noise and bustle somehow pleased Leslie, and soothed him; and he drifted along with the chattering stream of men, women, Mousmés, little boys and mere babies. Some of the children had long, curved trumpets of glass, from which they blew the most horrible of hobgoblin sounds. Here a man was frying pancakes, wrapping them in rice paper, and flinging them to unseen customers in the crowd, who flung him back the money. Here a person in spectacles, who looked like a professor of chemistry gone mad, was blowing from a glass-blower’s tube dragons and fish in sugar-candy. Apothecaries, with great golden eyes painted on their booths, were selling little rice paper charms, one to be taken dissolved in water for the stomach-ache, two for lumbago, three for migraine. Here stood a man who would pull your teeth out with his fingers, three sen a tooth.