Life's Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own PeopleKipling, Rudyard
History
Life's Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People
Kipling, Rudyard
India -- History -- British occupation, 1765-1947 -- Fiction; 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 big 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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