His Majesty Baby and Some Common PeopleMaclaren, Ian
General
His Majesty Baby and Some Common People
Maclaren, Ian
Fiction; Short stories
If any one imagines that the boy will now hurry with his fish, he does
not understand the nature of the race and its freedom from enslaving
rule. A few yards down Rose Terrace he comes upon the grocer's boy and
the two unearth a chemist's boy, and our boy produces a penny dreadful,
much tom and very fishy, but which contains the picture of a battle
swimming in blood, and the three sit down for its enjoyment. When they
have fairly exhausted their literature the boy receives his fee, as
the keeper of a circulating library, by being allowed to dip his finger
carefully wetted before into a bag of moist sugar, and to keep all that
he can take out, and the grocer's boy is able to close up the bag so
skilfully that the cook will never know that it has been opened.
From the chemist he receives a still more enjoyable because much more
perilous reward, for he is allowed to put his mouth to the spout of a
syphon and, if he can endure, to take what comes--and that is the reason
why syphons are never perfectly full. It occurs to the chemist at this
moment that he was told to lose no time in delivering some medicines,
and so he departs reluctantly; the conference breaks up, and it seems as
if nothing remained for the boy but to deliver the fish. Still you
never know what may happen, and as at that moment he catches sight of a
motor-car, it seems a mere duty to hurry back to the top of the terrace
to see whether it will break down. It does of course, for otherwise one
could hardly believe it to be a motor-car, and the boy under what he
would consider a call of providence, hastens to offer assistance. Other
boys arrive from different quarters, interested, sympathetic, obliging,
willing to co-operate with the irritated motor-man in every possible
way. They remain with him twenty-five minutes till he starts again, and
then three of them accompany him on a back seat, not because they were
invited, but because they feel they are needed. And then the boy goes
back to Rose Terrace and delivers the fish, stating with calm dignity,
that he had just been sent from the shop and had run all the way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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