“Villiers brat!” What a stab that is! What subtle poison it is saturated with! Poor Mrs. Villiers’s breath comes thick and hard; her face burns like fire, and her eyes almost snap out of her head. She has to press her hand to her heart as if to keep that organ from bursting; there is no relief from the dreadful throbbing and the dreadful pain. The slamming of Mrs. Ransom’s door shuts out all hope of succour. But it quickens Mrs. Villiers’s faculties, and makes her so alert, that when the two children come together again, which they very soon do, she is first at the door. Now is the opportunity to heap burning coals on the head of Mrs. Ransom. She heaps them.
“Wickliffe Morgan! what are you doing out there with that Ransom imp? Do you want to catch some disease? Come in here before I skin you.” And the door slams shut, and poor Mrs. Ransom, with trembling form and bated breath and flashing eyes, clinches her fingers, and glares with tremendous wrath over the landscape.
And in the absence of any real, tangible information as to the loss of that hoop, this is perhaps the very best that can be done on either side.
J. M. Bailey.
THE STOUT GENTLEMAN.
A TALE OF MYSTERY.
“IT WAS A RAINY SUNDAY.”
“I’ll cross it, though it blast me!”—Hamlet.
IT was a rainy Sunday, in the gloomy month of November. I had been detained in the course of a journey by a slight indisposition, from which I was recovering, but I was still feverish, and was obliged to keep within doors all day, in an inn of the small town of Derby. A wet Sunday in a country inn! whoever has had the luck to experience one can alone judge of my situation. The rain pattered against the casements; the bells tolled for church with a melancholy sound. I went to the window in quest of something to amuse the eye; but it seemed as if I had been placed completely out of reach of all amusement. The windows of my bedroom looked out among tiled roofs and stacks of chimneys; while those of my sitting-room commanded a full view of the stable-yard. I know of nothing more calculated to make a man sick of this world than a stable-yard on a rainy day. The place was littered with wet straw that had been kicked about by travellers and stable-boys; in one corner was a stagnant pool of water surrounding an island of muck; there were several half-drowned fowls crowded together under a cart, among which was a miserable, crestfallen cock, drenched out of all life and spirit; his drooping tail matted as it were into a single feather, along which the water trickled from his back. Near the cart was a half-dozing cow, chewing the cud, and standing patiently to be rained on, with wreaths of vapour rising from her reeking hide; a wall-eyed horse, tired of the loneliness of the stable, was poking his spectral head out of a window, with the rain dripping on it from the eaves; an unhappy cur, chained to a dog-house hard by uttering something every now and then between a bark and a yelp; a drab of a kitchen wench tramped backwards and forwards through the yard in pattens, looking as sulky as the weather itself; everything, in short, was comfortless and forlorn, excepting a crew of hard-drinking ducks, assembled like boon companions round a puddle, and making a riotous noise over their liquor.