“That’s because you are always in the way,” said Tant Sannie.
“But, aunt,” said Trana, presently, “I think he is very ugly.”
“Phugh!” said Tant Sannie. “It’s only because we’re not accustomed to such noses in this country. In his country he says all the people have such noses, and the redder your nose is the higher you are. He’s of the family of the Queen Victoria, you know,” said Tant Sannie, wakening up with her subject; “and he doesn’t think anything of governors and church elders and such people; they are nothing to him. When his aunt with the dropsy dies he’ll have money enough to buy all the farms in this district.”
“Oh!” said Trana. That certainly made a difference.
“Yes,” said Tant Sannie; “and he’s only forty-one, though you’d take him to be sixty. And he told me last night the real reason of his baldness.”
Tant Sannie then proceeded to relate how, at eighteen years of age, Bonaparte had courted a fair young lady. How a deadly rival, jealous of his verdant locks, his golden flowing hair, had, with a damnable and insinuating deception, made him a present of a pot of pomatum. How, applying it in the evening, on rising in the morning he found his pillow strewn with the golden locks, and, looking into the glass, beheld the shining and smooth expanse which henceforth he must bear. The few remaining hairs were turned to a silvery whiteness, and the young lady married his rival.
“And,” said Tant Sannie solemnly, “if it had not been for the grace of God, and reading of the psalms, he says he would have killed himself. He says he could kill himself quite easily if he wants to marry a woman and she won’t.”
“Alle wereld!” said Trana: and then they went to sleep.
Every one was lost in sleep soon; but from the window of the cabin the light streamed forth. It came from a dung fire, over which Waldo sat brooding. Hour after hour he sat there, now and again throwing a fresh lump of fuel on to the fire, which burnt up bravely, and then sank into a great bed of red coals, which reflected themselves in the boy’s eyes as he sat there brooding, brooding, brooding. At last, when the fire was blazing at its brightest, he rose suddenly and walked slowly to a beam from which an ox riem hung. Loosening it, he ran a noose in one end and then doubled it round his arm.
“Mine, mine! I have a right,” he muttered; and then something louder, “if I fall and am killed, so much the better!”