|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 14
His school experience was short, consisting, indeed, of but six bright
summer weeks, after which it had become his business to mind the baby,
while his mother went out to work. But the most vivid of the impressions
of his childhood were connected with that brief school career. Distinct
above the rest stood out the memory of one afternoon, when sitting on
his low stool he had seen dark smudges of shadow come straying, curling,
whirling across the squares of sunlight; when shouts had arisen in the
yard, and just as the dame had made Effie May hold out her hand for
dropping her thimble the third time, the back-door was burst open by
Ebenezer, the milkman, who cried out that the Dame's cow-house was on
fire. He could see the old lady now, with the child's shrinking fingers
firmly gripped in hers, her horny old hand arrested in the act of
descending on the little pink palm (which escaped scot-free in the
confusion) while she gazed for a moment, open-mouthed, at the speaker,
as though she had come to a word which _she_ couldn't spell, then jumped
up with surprising quickness and hobbled across the floor without her
stick, the point of her mob-cap nodding to every part of the room, while
she moved the whole of herself first to one side and then to the other
as she walked, like one of the geese waddling across the common.
"Goo back and mind yerr book!" cried the old lady to the sharp-eyed
little boy, who was peeping round her skirts. But he did not go back.
Who could, when they saw those tongues of flame shooting up, and the
volumes of smoke darkening the summer sky, as the wooden shed and the
palings near it caught and smoked and crackled, and heard the cries of
men and boys shouting for water and more water, which old Jack Foster,
and idiot Tom, and some women, with baskets hastily deposited by the
roadside, and even boys not much bigger than himself, were toiling to
bring as fast as possible in pails from the brook, before the flames
should spread to the row of cottages so perilously near? No earthly
power could have kept the mite out of the fray. Before the old dame knew
where he was, his little hands were clenched round the handle of a heavy
iron pail, and he was struggling up the yard to where the men were
tearing down the connecting fences, in a desperate endeavour to stay the
onrush, of the flames. To and fro, to and fro, the child toiled,
begrimed by falling blacks, scorched by the blaze, his whole mind intent
on one thing--to stop the burning of that charred and tottering mass.
It was done at last, and the cottages were saved. The rescue party
dispersed, and the dirty, tired boy strayed slowly homeward down the
village street. He could see himself now arriving soot-covered, and
well-nigh speechless with fatigue, at his mother's door, could hear the
cries and exclamations that arose at the sight of him, could feel the
tender hands that removed the clothes from his hot little body, and
washed him, and put him to bed. It took him several days to recover from
the fever into which he had put himself, and it was then he had begun to
mind the baby instead of going to school. Praise was liberally bestowed
in the county paper on Mr. Ebenezer Rooke and his assistants, who by
their energy and forethought had saved the village from destruction but
no one had noticed the efforts of the tiny child, working beyond his
strength; and, indeed, he himself had had no idea of being noticed.
As he sat now on the stool in the sunny doorway, and looked up the
mountain-valley, to which he had been brought in his declining years to
share his married daughter's home, the detail in that tragedy of his
childhood, which pictured itself in his mind's eye more clearly than any
other, was the shadow of the spreading, coiling puffs of smoke, which
had first caught his childish attention, blurring the bars of sunlight
on the floor of the Dame's kitchen. Perhaps it was on account of the
likeness to the pattern now made by the sun, as it shone through the
casement between him and the baby's cradle. For the gentle, domestic old
man was often now, as in his docile childhood, charged to "mind the
baby," and one of the quiet pleasures of his latter days was the sight
of the little floweret, that grew so sweetly beside his sere and
withered life. An uncultured sense of beauty within him was appealed to
by the rounded limbs, the silent, dimpled laugh, the tottering feet
feeling their unknown way, and all the sweet curves and softnesses, the
innocent surprises and _na�ve_ desires, which made up for him the image
of "the baby." He would have said she was "prutty," implying much by the
word.
As he gazed at his precious charge, and watched the sunlight pattern
slowly but surely creeping towards the foot of the cradle, he had an odd
feeling that school would soon be over. A moment after he rubbed his
eyes and looked again. Was it true, or was he dreaming? Were those
shadowy whirls of smoke, dimming the sunshine, a vision of the past, or
did he actually see them before him, as of old, coiling about and around
the bars of light on the floor? It was certainly there, the shadow of
smoke, and came he could not tell whence; for in all the unpeopled
valley there were, of human beings, as far as he knew at that moment,
only himself and the baby. To his mind, so full of the past, it seemed
the herald of another danger.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|