“What is that noise down there?” said the Bride. Both listened.
“Oh,” said Georgie Porgie, “I suppose some brute of a hillman has been beating his wife.”
“Beating—his—wife! How ghastly!” said the Bride. “Fancy your beating me!” She slipped an arm round her husband’s waist, and, leaning her head against his shoulder, looked out across the cloud-filled valley in deep content and security.
But it was Georgina crying, all by herself, down the hillside, among the stones of the water-course where the washermen wash the clothes.
LITTLE TOBRAH
Copyright, 1891, by Macmillan & Co.
“Prisoner’s head did not reach to the top of the dock,” as the English newspapers say. This case, however, was not reported because nobody cared by so much as a hempen rope for the life or death of Little Tobrah. The assessors in the red courthouse sat upon him all through the long hot afternoon, and whenever they asked him a question he salaamed and whined. Their verdict was that the evidence was inconclusive, and the Judge concurred. It was true that the dead body of Little Tobrah’s sister had been found at the bottom of the well, and Little Tobrah was the only human being within a half-mile radius at the time; but the child might have fallen in by accident. Therefore Little Tobrah was acquitted, and told to go where he pleased. This permission was not so generous as it sounds, for he had nowhere to go to, nothing in particular to eat, and nothing whatever to wear.
He trotted into the court-compound, and sat upon the well-curb, wondering whether an unsuccessful dive into the black water below would end in a forced voyage across the other Black Water. A groom put down an emptied nose-bag on the bricks, and Little Tobrah, being hungry, set himself to scrape out what wet grain the horse had overlooked.
“O Thief—and but newly set free from the terror of the Law! Come along!” said the groom, and Little Tobrah was led by the ear to a large and fat Englishman, who heard the tale of the theft.
“Hah!” said the Englishman three times (only he said a stronger word). “Put him into the net and take him home.” So Little Tobrah was thrown into the net of the cart, and, nothing doubting that he should be stuck like a pig, was driven to the Englishman’s house. “Hah!” said the Englishman as before. “Wet grain, by Jove! Feed the little beggar, some of you, and we’ll make a riding-boy of him? See? Wet grain, good Lord!”