DEADLY NIGHTSHADE.
Mrs. Carnaby was one of those characters emphatically called fidgets; she never rested till each individual came back, and she never rested when they did. Mr. C. was the first to return, and not in the first of tempers. He had been done out of his long-anticipated rural walk by setting his foot, before he had gone a hundred yards, on a yard of snake, and it had frightened him so that Mrs. Carnaby expected “it would turn his whole mash of blood, and give him the yellow jaundice.” Mr. Hodges came in second, but to the impatient eye of Miss C. certainly did not proceed from the Green Man with the straightness of a bullet from a rifle. Master Carnaby was a good third, for he had been well horse-whipped, just as he had got three little red blackberries and five thorns in his fingers, by a gentleman who did not approve of his trespassing upon his grounds. Boxer the bull-dog was fourth; he came back on three-legs, with his brindle well peppered with number six by the gamekeeper, to cure him of worrying park rabbits. In fact, poor Boxer, as Mrs. C. exclaimed, “was bleeding like a pig,” and the grateful animal acknowledged her compassionate notice by going and rubbing his shot hide against her shot silk, in return for which he got a blow quite hard enough to shiver the stick of something between a parasol and an umbrella. As for the nurse-maid and the twins they did not return for an hour, to the infinite horror of the mother; but just as they were all sitting down to dinner Betsey appeared with her charge, walked off their feet, with their “pretty mouths all besmeared” with blue and red juice; but no one of the party was botanist enough to tell whether the berries they were munching were hips and haws, or bilberries, or deadly nightshade, but maternal anxiety made sure it was the “rank pison.” Accordingly dinner was postponed, and they set to get up an extempore fire to make the kettle hot, and as soon as the water was warm enough, these “two pretty babes” were well drenched, and were soon as perfectly uncomfortable as they had been two months before in a rough steam trip to Margate. As soon as peace was restored it transpired, from an examination of the children, and a very cross examination of the nurse-maid, that they had met with a real gipsy woman in the forest who had told Betty’s fortune, but had omitted to prognosticate that her mistress would give her warning on the spot, and that her gipsying would end, as it actually did, in finding herself suddenly out of place in the middle of a forest. Like other servants, when they lose a comfortable situation, “some natural tears she shed,” but did not wipe them soon, as did “our general mother,” for the very excellent reason that she had spread her pocket handkerchief on the ground to sit upon, somewhere between Wanstead and Walthamstow, and had left it as a waif to the lord of the manor.
BACKING OUT OF GOING TO MARKET.
Dinner time then came again, to the especial delight of the two empty children, though, thanks to the horse and dog, it was principally broken victuals. But on sitting down and counting heads Master C. had a second time absconded during the last bustle; and, as his mother could not touch a morsel for anxiety, Mr. Carnaby was obliged to set out fasting to look for him, and had soon the satisfaction of finding him sitting hatless crying in a wet ditch, and scraping a suit of brown off a suit of blue with an old oyster shell. His father, in the first transport of anger and hunger, gave him what boys call “a regular larruping,” then a good rubbing down with a bunch of fern, and then brought him back to the cold collation, with the comfortable threat that he should go without his dinner. As soon as the culprit could explain for sobbing, he told them that “he had gone for a little walk, like, and saw the most capital donkey with a saddle and bridle feeding wild about the forest as if he belonged to nobody, and he just got on him like, like they used to do at Margate; and then the donkey set off full tear, and never stopped till he came to a tent of gipsies in the middle of the wood; and they all set upon him, and swore at him like anything for running away with their donkey; and then all of a sudden he lost his hat and his handkerchief, and his money out of his pockets like conjuring; then they told him to run for his life, and so he did, and as for the mud it was all along of jumping over a hedge that had no other side to it.” This intelligence threw Mrs. Carnaby into an agony of horror which could only be pacified by their immediately packing up and removing, eatables and all, to a less lonesome place by the side of the road, an operation that was performed by their all pulling and pushing at the cart, as the horse had taken French leave of absence.
It was now Miss Carnaby’s turn to be discomfited: her retiring disposition made her wince under the idea of dining in public; for being market day at Romford, they were over-looked by plenty of farmers and pig butchers: consequently, after a very miffy dialogue with her mother, the young lady took herself off, as she was desired, with “her romantical notions,” to a place of more solitude, and Mr. Hodges, as in gallantry bound, postponed his dinner till his tea to keep her company. In the mean time, Betsey, who had been sent up to the Green Man for the porter, returned with the empty tankard, and a terrified tale of being “cotch’d hold on by a ruffian in the wood, that had drunk up all the beer to all their very good healths.” The first impulse of Mr. Carnaby was to jump up to do justice on the vagabond, but Mrs. C—— had the presence of mind to catch hold of his coat-flaps so abruptly, that before he could well feel his legs, he found himself sitting in a large plum pie, which the children had just set their hearts upon; of course it did not mend his temper to hear the shout from a dozen ragged boys who were looking on; and in the crisis of his vexation, he vented such a fervent devil’s blessing on gipsy parties, and all that proposed them, that Mrs. Carnaby was obliged to take it up, and to tell him sharply, what in reality was true enough, that “if people did have gipsy parties, it didn’t follow that their stupid husbands was to sit down on plum pies.” Heaven knows to what size and shape this little quarrel might have ripened, but for the appearance of Miss Carnaby, who, with a terrified exclamation sat herself down, and after a vain attempt to recover, went off into a strong fit of what her mother called “kicking hysterics.” The cause was soon explained by the appearance of Mr. Hodges, with one eye poached black, and a dog-bite in the calf of his leg, because “he had only stood looking on at two men setting wires for rabbits, thinking to himself if he watched them well he could learn how to do it.” Fortunately, Miss Carnaby came to just in time to concur with her father and Mr. Hodges in the opinion, that the best thing they could all do was to pack up and go home, but which was stoutly combated by Mrs. Carnaby, who insisted that she was resolved to take tea in a wood for once in her life, and she was seconded by the children and Master C——, who said they hadn’t had any pleasure yet. It was an unanswerable argument; sticks were collected, a fire was made, the kettle boiled, the tea-things were set in order, the bread and butter was cut, and pleasure began to smile on the gipsy party so placidly that Mr. Hodges was encouraged to begin playing “In my Cottage near a Wood,” on the key bugle, but was obliged to break off in the middle, on finding that it acted as a bugle call to a corps of observation, who came and stood round to see “Rural Felicity.” Mrs. Carnaby, however, was happy; but “there is many a slip between the tea-cup and the lip.” She was in the triumphant fact of pouring the hot water on her best souchong, in her best china tea-pot, when a very well-charged gun went off just on the other side of the park palings, and Mrs. Carnaby had not been born like her Grace, old Sarah of Marlborough, “before nerves came in fashion.” The tea-kettle dropped from her hand upon the tea-pot, which it dashed to atoms, and then lay on its side, hot watering the daisies and the dandelions that had the luck to grow near it. “Misfortunes never come single,” and the gun, therefore, acted like a double one in its inflictions; for no sooner did Boxer recognise its sound than he jumped up, and with an alarming howl dashed through the rest of the tea service, as if he had absorbed another ounce of number six: a fresh shout from the bystanders welcomed this new disaster, and with the true spirit of “biting a bitten cur,” they began to heap embarrassments on the disconcerted gipsyers. They kept pitching sticks into the fire till it grew a bonfire, and made cockshies of the remaining crockery; some audacious boys even helped themselves to bread and butter, as if on the principle that the open air ought to keep open house. As there were too many assailants to chastise, the only remedy was to pack up and take to the road as fast as they could, with a horse which they found with two broken knees, the consequence of his being too curious in the construction of a gravel-pit. “You may say what you like,” said Mr. Carnaby, in his summing up, “but for my part I must say of gipsying, that it’s impossible to take to it without being regularly ‘done brown.’”
THE FORTUNE HUNTER.