Fairies -- Juvenile fiction; Fantasy literature; Short stories, English; Siblings -- Juvenile fiction
‘I left ‘em singing hymns and I went down to old Conrad Gerhard. He
wasn’t at all surprised when I told him I was young Gert Schwankfelder
that was. He knew Toby. His wife she walked me into the back-yard
without a word, and she washed me and she cut my hair to the edge of a
basin, and she put me to bed, and oh! how I slept--how I slept in that
little room behind the oven looking on the flower garden! I didn’t know
Toby went to the Embuscade that night and bought me off Dr Karaguen for
twelve dollars and a dozen bottles of Seneca Oil. Karaguen wanted a new
lace to his coat, and he reckoned I hadn’t long to live; so he put me
down as “discharged sick.”
‘I like Toby,’ said Una.
‘Who was he?’ said Puck.
‘Apothecary Tobias Hirte,’ Pharaoh replied. ‘One Hundred and Eighteen,
Second Street--the famous Seneca Oil man, that lived half of every year
among the Indians. But let me tell my tale my own way, same as his brown
mare used to go to Lebanon.’
‘Then why did he keep her in Davy Jones’s locker?’ Dan asked. ‘That was
his joke. He kept her under David Jones’s hat shop in the “Buck” tavern
yard, and his Indian friends kept their ponies there when they visited
him. I looked after the horses when I wasn’t rolling pills on top of
the old spinet, while he played his fiddle and Red Jacket sang hymns.
I liked it. I had good victuals, light work, a suit o’ clean clothes, a
plenty music, and quiet, smiling German folk all around that let me
sit in their gardens. My first Sunday, Toby took me to his church in
Moravian Alley; and that was in a garden too. The women wore long-eared
caps and handkerchiefs. They came in at one door and the men at another,
and there was a brass chandelier you could see your face in, and a
nigger-boy to blow the organ bellows. I carried Toby’s fiddle, and he
played pretty much as he chose all against the organ and the singing. He
was the only one they let do it, for they was a simple-minded folk. They
used to wash each other’s feet up in the attic to keep ‘emselves humble:
which Lord knows they didn’t need.’
‘How very queer!’ said Una.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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