Bye and bye, the lip broke off, and then some of the children cried.
“This is too realistic,” said Mrs. Waverlee, “but the cow is not hurt, and the wicked sport of bull-baiting is all over.”
I may say, in passing, that some people blame Mrs. Waverlee because she does not keep everything painful from the children.
“I do not wish to make them soft,” she says with flashing eyes. “Evil and suffering are all about them. They must have some acquaintance with them in order to be able to overcome them. I make my own boy sit in school beside a beautiful and innocent German lad, to teach him to overcome his hatred for the nation.”
After the cow had been wheeled away, and her broken nose hidden in a young lilac bush, Mrs. Waverlee said, “Now, let us examine doggie’s points.”
I opened my eyes. I didn’t know she knew so much about dogs. She made Gringo walk away from her, and toward her, and she felt his back and his head, and had him sit down and get up, and she turned over his rose ears to show the children the pink lining, and pinched his brisket, and lifted his feet to see if they were sound, showed the children the set-out of the shoulders that enabled a bulldog to crouch low between the horns of an angry bull who tried to gore him. Then she explained that sometimes twenty or thirty dogs would be killed before the bull could be thrown.
That was news to me, and I whispered to Gringo, “I didn’t know you actually had to throw the bull.”
“Certainly,” he replied, “a heavy dog with a good grip could do it easily, if he knew how.”
After Mrs. Waverlee penalised Gringo slightly, because the wheel of his back wasn’t quite perfect, he stepped off the box, and everybody went home to lunch.
Mrs. Waverlee invited Gringo and me to accompany her and Egbert to their cottage, and we had a fine lunch with Patsie, Egbert’s fox-terrier who had been confined to the house with a sore paw. They had a lovely little cottage, but it had a small garden only. One day I heard Mrs. Bonstone, who has become very intimate with Mrs. Waverlee, say to her, “Bretwalda, you are a rich woman. Why do you not buy a larger place than this?”