Pomona's Travels: A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former HandmaidenStockton, Frank R.
General
Pomona's Travels: A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former Handmaiden
Stockton, Frank R.
Americans -- Great Britain -- Fiction; Epistolary fiction; Voyages and travels -- Fiction
I wondered which the man would think Jone was, if he knew we was
stopping at the Old Hall; but I didn't ask him, and only said that
other people besides shopkeepers and clergymen went to the Old Hall,
for Mary Queen of Scots used to stop at that house when she came to
take the waters, and her room was still there, just as it used to be.
"Mary Queen of Scots!" said he. "At the Old Hall?"
"Yes," said I, "that's where she used to go; that was her hotel."
"Queen Mary, Queen of the Scots!" he said again. "Well, well, I
wouldn't have believed it. But them Scotch people always was
close-fisted. Now if it had been Queen Elizabeth, she wouldn't have
minded a pound a day;" and then, after asking Jone to excuse him for
forgetting his manners and not asking where his rheumatism was, and
having got his answer, he went away, wondering, I expect, how Mary
Queen of Scots could have been so stingy.
But although we could see so much sitting on benches, I didn't give up
Jone and the bath-chairs, and day before yesterday I got the better of
him. "Now," said I, "it is stupid for you to be sitting around in this
way as if you was a statue of a public benefactor carved by
subscription and set up in a park. The only sensible thing for you to
do is to take a bath-chair and go around and see things. And if you are
afraid people will think you are being taken to a hospital, you can put
down the top of the thing, and sit up straight and smoke your pipe.
Patients in ambulances never smoke pipes. And if you don't want me
walking by your side like a trained nurse, I'll take another chair and
be pulled along with you."
The idea of a pipe, and me being in another chair, rather struck his
fancy, and he said he would consider it; and so that afternoon we went
to the hotel door and looked at the long line of bath-chairs standing
at the curbstone on the other side of the street, with the men waiting
for jobs. The chairs was all pretty much alike and looked very
comfortable, but the men was as different as if they had been horses.
Some looked gay and spirited, and others tired and worn out, as if they
had belonged to sporting men and had been driven half to death. And
then again there was some that looked fat and lazy, like the old horses
on a farm, that the women drive to town.
Jone picked out a good man, who looked as if he was well broken and not
afraid of locomotives and able to do good work in single harness. When
I got Jone in the bath-chair, with the buggy-top down, and his pipe
lighted, and his hat cocked on one side a little, so as to look as if
he was doing the whole thing for a lark, I called another chair, not
caring what sort of one it was, and then we told the men to pull us
around for a couple of hours, leaving it to them to take us to
agreeable spots, which they said they would do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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