Sweethearts at HomeCrockett, S. R. (Samuel Rutherford)
General
Sweethearts at Home
Crockett, S. R. (Samuel Rutherford)
Girls -- Diaries
Perhaps, being exceptionally good children, _you_ are not sorry for
naughty Rooty. ("Oh, yes, we are! We are!") But, anyway, his father was
sorry for him, though all the time he was promising him the best
"hiding" he had ever had in his life when he got him safe back again.
("Bet he never got a whack!" said Sir Toady, who is an authority on the
subject.) So, locking the children in and putting the key in his pocket,
the Little Green Man and his wife went away over the moorland to look
for the Ugly Gray Dwarf. The man did not want the woman to come. But she
begged of him, weeping, saying that she would go "human" if she were
left (and among the Green People that is a terrible word, and a yet more
terrible thing[1]). So in the end the Little Green Man let her come.
[Footnote 1: It is as we say "fey."]
Then she wanted to go direct to the cave, but her husband, who had had a
lot of experience, showed her how impossible and foolish that was. For
the Gray Dwarf would just lie down behind a big bowlder and wait for
them. Then he would stun them with a log or strangle them with his long
twisty fingers as they went by.
So instead they went all the way round by John Knox's Pulpit and the
Folds Firs, that they might turn the flank of the enemy, and so come at
his cave by a way he would never expect. It was a narrow cleft between
two rocks up which they had to come--the Little Green Man and his woman.
They crawled and crawled, noiseless as earth-worms on a plowed field.
All the while the eyes of the Little Green Man shot out small sparkles
of fire, though the lids of them were closed so that they showed like
slits in a drying plaster wall.
After a long climb they looked over a ridge of many bowlders and much
heather--the Little Green Man and his woman close behind him. And at the
sight they saw there the wife would have screamed out and run forward.
For she was a real woman, you see, though little and green. Only her
husband was prepared for her, knowing, after so many years, exactly what
she would do. So he first put the palm of his hand across her mouth to
keep in the scream, and next gave her the pouch of arrow-heads to hold.
Then with a pair of tweezers made of bent wood he lifted the little
poisoned flakelets of flint and dropped each into a split in the
arrow-head. Then his wife deftly bound each of them about with green
cord--for that was _her_ part of the business. She forgot about
screaming when she had anything to do.
Then the Little Green Man peered cautiously from behind a rock, first
giving his wife a good push with his foot as a warning--but, of course,
you know, kindly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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