We went in, and Bess ran up to her lessons. Alas! study to my little maid is always a period of sadness. “Real children never like lessons,” is my little girl’s dictum. They don’t like useless things; and to Bess, French, geography, history, and music are all useless and worthless acquisitions. As I sat and embroidered in the Chapel Hall, I was suddenly told that a boy outside wished to speak to me. I left a carnation spray, a copy of a design of one of Mary Queen of Scots’, and looked up to welcome Thady Malone, a little Irish lad, who, with his father and mother, had lately come into the parish.
Thady is the terror of the locality, and the hero of all the naughty-boy stories of the neighbourhood.
“MORE DEVIL THAN BOY”
According to my old gardener, who looks at him with an evil eye, “Thady be more devil than boy.” Burbidge declares that Thady is a plague, and a sore to the town, and “wull be the death of some ’un, unless he kills hisself first.” The fact is, Thady has done every naughty thing conceivable. He has fired woods, put strings across roads, I have been told, to try and trip up his natural enemy, James Grogan, the reigning policeman, and even put logs across the little local line, I have been assured; but this he stoutly denies himself. He has been thrashed by indignant farmers for running their sheep, and yet, as Bess says, always turns up “naughty and nice,” with the politest of manners, which he gets from “auld Oireland,” and the sweetest and most innocent of baby faces out of which natural wickedness ever peeped.
A minute later and Thady stood before me, bare-legged and bonny, with an expectant smile in his eyes. I opened the conversation by asking him from where he came? “Right from Mrs. Harley.” And he added, with a catch in his throat, “The poor lady is like to die entirely, judging by what Mrs. Betty said, and so I have come to you to see what your leddyship can do to stop the disease.”
Thady spoke in the most engaging brogue, and he had the sunniest, pleasantest smile in the world. He stood before me, with his little bare feet shyly touching the fringe of the carpet.
No other child in the old town goes barefoot. He is known at Wenlock by the nickname of “Naughty Bare-legs,” and has a shock of curly hair and dancing grey-blue eyes.
“I’ll come at once,” I said. “But why, Thady, have they sent you?”
Thady scratched his head and looked puzzled, declared he didn’t know, but protested there was nothing he wouldn’t do to oblige Mrs. Harley, for all, he averred, “she’s a hathan, and never says a prayer to the blessed Virgin.”