I couldn’t believe my eyes!
There sat an old lady of eighty or ninety, with soft white hair—the very picture of fragility; opposite her was a nurse in dark uniform, in charge of three dainty little children in pink and white—mere babies of three or four—with innocent blue eyes gazing all round them. And, actually, that ruffianly knecht was about to bombard the group with whatever he had in his hand!
Bang went a big mass of something—presumably hard, from the rattle it made—against the side of the carriage.
Happily he was a poor marksman, that rascally slager; for at that short range he ought to have been able to demolish so fragile an old lady at the first shot, or at the very least have put out one eye.
As it was, he only knocked off her bonnet.
Enraged, apparently, at his poor practice at a practically stationary target so close at hand, he picked up another half-brick and wheeled, to take more deliberate aim.
The delicate old lady grew pale, and spasmodically fumbled with her parasol to shield the children.
NEMESIS.
I thought her eye caught mine; and, seeing there was no escape for her unless I interposed—no one till now seemed to have noticed the occurrence—I shouted, “Stop, slager, stop!” and whisked Boyton’s learned pages right into his face, taking care at the same moment to administer a vigorous push to the long arm of the lever conveniently made by his basket.
This forced him to revolve suddenly on his own axis—beefsteak and all; and, as he spun round, I accelerated his motion with a pat or two from the ‘compendium’. It was all the work of an instant, and executed just in time. The grammatical caress foiled his aim completely, and he flung his missile blindly in the wrong direction.