BAD OLD DAYS
Like all good storytellers, E. knows that emotion and sentiment are great helps, and when he talks of his boyhood he is never a mere boy or a youth but 'a little lad.' It colours the picture fittingly. 'When 1 was a little lad,, he says, was sent out to earn me keep. .1 never had enough to eat. I lifted turnips la mud up to me knees. Once I cut me poor little 'and an' nobody done nothin' for it. It took weeks to 'cal. The horse I 'ad to look after bit me on the back. I was a poor little soul with not a pickin' on me, but it left its teeth marks on me for many a day.' He sucks 110 pipe while the awful recollection of the bad old days passes and his audience takes the full impact of something Charles Dickens might have written about. It is bard, nevertheless, to feel just as one should at the telling of this sad tale, for E. is the picture of health and his con- siderable bulk fills the biggest chair in the room.
Previous page
