India -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, English
"An' then Dr. Warbottom comes ridin' up, an' Jesse Roantree along with
'im. He was a high-larned doctor, but he talked wi' poor folk same as
theirsens. 'What's ta bin agaate on naa?' he sings out. 'Brekkin' tha
thick head?' An' he felt me all ovver. 'That's none broken. Tha' nobbut
knocked a bit sillier than ordinary, an' that's daaft eneaf.' An' soa he
went on, callin' me all the names he could think on, but settin' my arm,
wi' Jesse's help, as careful as could be. 'Yo' mun let the big oaf bide
here a bit, Jesse,' he says, when he hed strapped me up an' given me a
dose o' physic; 'an' you an' 'Liza will tend him, though he's scarcelins
worth the trouble. An' tha'll lose tha work,' sez he, 'an' tha'll be upon
th' Sick Club for a couple o' months an' more. Doesn't tha think tha's a
fool?'"
"But whin was a young man, high or low, the other av a fool, I'd like to
know?" said Mulvaney, "Sure, folly's the only safe way to wisdom, for I've
thried it."
"Wisdom!" grinned Ortheris, scanning his comrades with uplifted chin.
"You're bloomin' Solomons, you two, ain't you?"
Learoyd went calmly on, with a steady eye like an ox chewing the cud.
"And that was how I come to know 'Liza Roantree. There's some tunes as she
used to sing--aw, she were always singin'--that fetches Greenhow Hill
before my eyes as fair as yon brow across there. And she would learn me to
sing bass, an' I was to go to th' chapel wi' 'em where Jesse and she led
the singin', th' old man playin' the fiddle. He was a strange chap, old
Jesse, fair mad wi' music, an' he made me promise to learn the big fiddle
when my arm was better. It belonged to him, and it stood up in a big case
alongside o' th' eight-day clock, but Willie Satterthwaite, as played it
in the chapel, had getten deaf as a door-post, and it vexed Jesse, as he
had to rap him ower his head wi' th' fiddle-stick to make him give ower
sawin' at th' right time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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