“Where’s the waits? Where’s Father Chris’mus? Where’s St. Gearge?” he kept saying peevishly. Jinny put him off with vague replies or none. Once he alarmed her by asking suddenly: “Where’s the Doctor?” She was reassured when he began spouting:
“Oi carry a bottle of alicampane.”
He passed on to imagine himself as St. George, and seizing the poker for a sword declaimed vigorously, if imperfectly:
“Oi’ll fight the Russian Bear, he shall not fly,
Oi’ll cut him down or else Oi’ll die.”
“Ain’t we a-gooin’ to see the mummers?” he inquired angrily as Christmas Day waned.
“Perhaps they are ill or it’s too cold,” she suggested feebly.
“But they’re gooin’ around to other folk!” he protested. “Oi seen ’em through my glass!”
“Well, then you have seen them,” she said still more feebly. Inwardly she wondered if he had detected herself, on her way to church, carrying off some Christmas dinner to Uncle Lilliwhyte’s hut. The telescope was a new terror added to life.
She had wanted to invite the prop of her larder to take his Christmas dinner with them, but her grandfather refused violently to sit down with such a “ragamuffin.” His sense of caste was acute, and as Jinny’s sense of smell was equally acute, she would not have persisted, even had renewed rheumatism not confined the ancient to his hut.