So leaving Hunker Court he struck across the most unfrequented streets,
where only a stray urchin (probably a benighted Episcopalian) was
spending the Sabbath chivying cats, to the mountainous regions of
Craigside, where the tall "lands" of St. Leonards look out upon the
quarried crags and steep hill ridges of Arthur's Seat. For Cleg was
fortunate enough to be a town boy who had the country at his command
just over the wall—and a wall, too, which he could climb at as many
as twenty points. Only bare stubby feet, however, could overpass
these perilous clefts. Cleg's great toes, horny as if shod with iron,
fitted exactly into the stone crevices from which the mortar had been
loosened. His grimy little fingers found a purchase in the slightest
nicks. And once on the other side, there was no policeman, park-keeper,
or other person in authority, who could make the pace with Cleg's bare
brown legs, at least up the loose clatter of the shingle between the
lower greensward and the Radical Road.
So, after being expelled from Hunker Court, Cleg made straight for a
nook of his own among the crags. Here, like a prudent outlaw, he took
account of his possessions with a view to arranging his future career
of crime. He turned out his pockets into his hat. This was, indeed,
a curious thing to do. For the article which he wore upon his shaggy
locks was now little more than the rim of what had once been a covering
for the head, proof against wind and water. But though Cleg's treasures
rested upon the ground, the fact that they were within his hat-rim
focussed them, as it were, and their relative worth was the more easily
determined.
The first article which Cleg deposited upon the ground inside his hat
was a box of matches, which had been given him to light the gas with in
the outlying corners of Hunker Court school, for that dank cellar was
gloomy enough even on a summer afternoon. Then came some string, the
long-pronged nipping-wires which he had taken from his father's stores,
a pair of pincers, a knife with one whole and one broken blade, a pipe,
some brown-paper tobacco of a good brand, a half-written exercise-book
from the day-school at which Cleg occasionally looked in, five marbles
of a variety known as "commonies," one noble knuckler of alabaster
which Cleg would not have parted with for his life, a piece of dry
bread, and, lastly, half an apple, with encroaching bays and projecting
promontories, which indicated in every case but one the gap in Cleg's
dental formation on the left side of his upper jaw, which dated from
his great fight with Hole in the Wa' in the police yard. The exception
was a clean semicircle, bitten right into the apple-core. This was the
tidemark of a friendly bite Cleg had given to a friend, in whose double
row were no gaps. The perfect crescent had been made by the teeth of a
lassie—one Vara Kavannah.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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