“Lord bless you, sir, yes.”
“Go and get your blankets ready. We shall soon have him alive and roaring.”
John Gore carried the child into the farm kitchen, and, laying him in a blanket almost upon the hearth-stone, rubbed and kneaded him till the skin began to redden. A loud sneeze was the first greeting that he gave them. His mother went down on her knees instantly and huddled him to her bosom, the blanket trailing across the brick floor.
“You be for terrifying me, you God-forsaken little rascal! Playing these tricks on us, with the good gentleman here wet to the skin and his stockings all mud! Won’t I smack ye when ye can bear a hand on a spot where a hand can’t do much harm!”
XXVII
Mr. Christopher Jennifer came to the kitchen in the middle of all this fussing over the child, with his bill and his hedging-gloves and his boots caked with muck. He was a short, round-headed man with bowed legs and a broad chest, and, after hearing the truth of it all from his wife, he laid the child solemnly and deliberately across his knee. “Come now, Chris, man, he ben’t fit for ye yet.”
“Oh, ben’t he? I reckon it will make him livelier nor cakes.”
And he began in the same stolid and unflurried fashion to lay one of his hedging-gloves across the child, till the sound of his roaring sent Death out with ignominy by the back door.
The chastening of youth attended to, Mr. Jennifer and his woman began to make a great to-do over John Gore and Mr. Pepys. The farmer took John Gore upstairs to the best bedroom, fetched out his Sabbath suit of gray cloth with the silver buttons, and gave his guest a change of stockings and of underwear. Then he went and mixed him a glass of hot toddy, remarking, with grave solemnity:
“That water be powerful wet!”