Young carroty-pow must have been in a fine fantigue,
When she found I’d mizzled. Yet, if she’d turned up
In time, poor mealy-face, for all your roses,
You’d never have clapped eyes on Krindlesyke:
This countryside and you would still be strangers.
Eliza:
In time!
Ezra:
A narrow squeak.
Eliza:
If she’d turned up,
The red-haired girl had lived at Krindlesyke,
Instead of me, this forty-year: and I—
I might ... But we must dree our weird. And yet,
To think what my life might have been, if only—
The difference!
Ezra:
Ay, and hers, “if ifs and ans!”
But I’m none certain she’d have seen it, either.
I could have had her without wedding her,
And no mistake, the nickering, red-haired baggage.
Though she was merry, she’d big rabbit-teeth,
Might prove gey ill to live with; ay, and a swarm
Of little sandy moppies like their doe,
Buck-teeth and freckled noses and saucer-eyes,
Gaping and squealing round the table at dinner,
And calling me their dad, as likely as not:
Though little her mug would matter, now I’m blind;
And by this there’ll scarce be a stump in her yellow gums,
And not a red hair to her nodding poll—
That shock of flame a shrivelled, grizzled wisp
Like bracken after a heathfire; that creamy skin,
Like a plucked hen’s. But she’d a merry eye,
The giglet; and that coppertop of hers
Was good to think on of a nippy morning:
While you—but you were young then ...
Eliza: