The Maid of SkerBlackmore, R. D. (Richard Doddridge)
General
The Maid of Sker
Blackmore, R. D. (Richard Doddridge)
Foundlings -- Fiction; Romance fiction; Wales -- Fiction
She pointed all round for everybody, with all ten fingers spread
everyway. Then Watkin came after her, like her slave, with a foolish
grin on his countenance, in spite of the undertaking business.
"If you please, sir, Mr Llewellyn," he said, "we was forced to bring her
over; she have been crying so dreadful, and shivering about the black
pit-hole so. And when the black things came into the house, she was
going clean out of her little mind, ever so many times almost. No use
it was at all to tell her ever so much a-yard they was. 'I don't yike
back, and I 'on't have back. Yite I yikes, and boo I yikes; and my dear
papa be so very angy, when I tells him all about it.' She went on like
that, and she did so cry, mother said she must change the air a bit."
All the time he was telling me this, she watched him with her head on
one side and her lips kept ready in the most comic manner, as much as to
say, "Now you tell any stories at my expense, and you may look out." But
Watkin was truth itself, and she nodded, and said "Ness," at the end of
his speech.
"And, if you please, sir, Mr Llewellyn, whatever is a 'belung,' sir? All
the way she have been asking for 'belung, belung, belung.' And I cannot
tell for the life of me whatever is 'belung.'"
"Boy, never ask what is unbecoming," I replied, in a manner which made
him blush, according to my intention. For the word might be English for
all I knew, and have something of high life in it. However, I found,
by-and-by, that it meant what she was able to call "Ummibella," when
promoted a year in the dictionary.
But now anybody should only have seen her, who wanted a little rousing
up. My cottage, of course, is not much to boast of, compared with
castles, and so on; nevertheless there is something about it pleasant
and good, like its owner. You might see ever so many houses, and think
them larger, and grander, and so on, with more opportunity for sitting
down, and less for knocking your head perhaps; and after all you would
come back to mine. Not for the sake of the meat in the cupboard--because
I seldom had any, and far inferior men had more; but because--well, it
does not matter. I never could make you understand, unless you came to
see it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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