"Oh—I know!—Satant gets into yer 'art, an' gives 'ee belly-ache an' toothache."
Not many days afterwards, Tommy was being sent to bed for getting his feet wet. "Yu daring rascal! I'll knock yer head off if yu du it again. Yu'll die, yu will! An' what'll yu du then?"
"Go to heaven, o' course."
"An' what do you think they'll say to 'ee there? Eh?"
Tommy was puzzled.
"You can ask 'em to send us better weather." I suggested.
"Tell 'ee what I'll do," said Tommy with a prodigiously wise squint. "I'll take up a buckle-strap to thiccy ol' God, if 'er don't send better weather, an' then yu won't none on 'ee get sent to bed for wet feet!"
19
At a corner near here, there is a very blank cottage wall, and in the centre of it a little window. Behind the closed window, all day and every day, sits an old woman at her lace pillow. Some portraits—Rembrandt's especially—give one the impression that a shutter has suddenly been drawn aside; that behind the shutter we are allowed to watch for a moment or two a face so full of meaning as to be almost more than human. The same impression is given me by the old lace-maker in the window when I pass to and fro, and catch sight of her face so still, her hands so active, her bobbins so swift and, because of the intervening glass, so silent. How nervously the hands speed with the bobbins, how very deliberately with the pins that make the pattern! How hardly human it is!
One evening, however, the window was open, children stood round in a group, and I heard the small click of the bobbins through the still air. The children were laughing, delighted with the old woman's swiftness. She that had been a picture, was become a living being.