ILLUSTRATIONS
| PAGE | |
| She stood watching | [ Frontispiece] |
| “It looks almost finished” | [ 67] |
| “I am loafing my life away” | [ 161] |
| “Top-o’-the-Hill” | [ 343] |
BOOK ONE
The Golden Child
“Are you a child or a teetotum?” the Sheep asked.
The Vinegar Saint
I
LEGS
THE young man of twenty-three was not a clever tennis player, but his partner and his opponents, men of forty, were obviously less clever. The Mount Airy Club courts were sought chiefly by two sorts of players, boys too uncourageous for baseball, and men of impending girth; secluded by fine old ragged trees and off an unused road, it had no gallery of experts to disturb the timid.
The young man belonged to neither class, but he found his Saturday afternoon game of tennis with perspiring business-men just the thing to put him in tone for his own week’s business of research among revered but defunct Elizabethans. Besides, he often had the joys of victory hard won.
At present, he was fighting it out with a butter-and-egg middleman. Years of handling a fragile and perishable commodity had made the middleman self-conscious in the presence of so egg-like an object as a tennis ball. He puzzled his opponents, therefore, as the inexperienced whist player so often does, by unaccountable delicacy when one naturally expected a smashing drive, and at other times by reckless lobbing—as if he had just condemned a bad shipment!—when the safe return was a gentle touch.
A wife or two sat sewing in the lee of a cherry tree. They often stopped their mild chatter to watch some contested point—sometimes the ball stayed in play unaccountably long; a quarter of the returns was accidental!—at such times the repartee on the courts was equally compelling. A “professor” is by instinct talkative, and the enforced reticence of butter-and-egg middlemen unloosens sudden outbursts of speech—the figure has an unfortunate but truthful suggestion—like dammed things.