It was thus that Priscilla, to whom in after times great lights of criticism listened with approval, was compelled to stoop to artifice and bribery in order to secure and hold her first audience. Whereupon the authoress took paper from her pocket, and as she did so, held the manuscript with its back to Napoleon Smith, in order to conceal the suspicious shortness of the lines. But that great soldier instantly detected the subterfuge.
"It's a penny more for listening to poetry!" he said, with sudden alacrity.
"I know it is," replied Prissy sadly, "but you might be nice about it just this once. I'm dreadfully, dreadfully poor this week, Hugh John!"
"So am I," retorted Napoleon Smith sternly; "if I wasn't, do you think I would listen at all to your beastly old poetry? Drive on!"
Thus encouraged, Priscilla meekly began
"It means himself," said Priscilla meekly.
"Then why doesn't it say so?" cried the critic triumphantly, tapping his boot with the "boned" dog-whip just like any ordinary lord of creation in presence of his inferiors.
"It's poetry," explained Priscilla timidly.
"It's silly!" retorted Napoleon, judicially and finally.
Priscilla resumed her reading in a lower and more hurried tone. She knew that she was skating over thin ice.
"No, I don't mean 'stately,'" said Priscilla, "I mean 'stealthy,' the way a horse goes on sand. You go and gallop on the sea-shore and you'll find out."
I've listened quite a pennyworth now."
Priscilla hurried on more quickly than ever.
"Shan't," said Priscilla, the pride of successful achievement swelling in her breast; "besides, it isn't Saturday yet, and you've only listened to three verses anyway. You will have to listen to ever so much more than that before you get a penny."
"Hugh
John! Priscilla!" came a voice from a distance.
The great soldier Napoleon Smith instantly effected a retreat in masterly fashion behind a gooseberry bush.
"There's Jane calling us," said Priscilla; "she wants us to go in and be washed for dinner."
"Course she does," sneered Napoleon; "think she's out screeching like that for fun? Well, let her. I am not going in to be towelled till I'm all over red and scurfy, and get no end of soap in my eyes."
"But Jane wants you; she'll be so cross if you don't come."
"I don't care for Jane," said Napoleon Smith with dignity, but all the same making himself as small as possible behind his gooseberry bush.
"But if you don't come in, Jane will tell father "
"I don't care for father " the prone but gallant General was proceeding to declare in the face of Priscilla's horrified protestations that he mustn't speak so, when a slow heavy step was heard on the other side of the hedge, and a deep voice uttered the single syllable, "John! "
"Yes, father," a meek young man standing up behind the gooseberry bush instantly replied: he was trying to brush himself as clean as circumstances would permit. "Yes, father; were you calling me, father?"
Incredible as it seems, the meek and apologetic words were those of that bold enemy of tyrants, General Napoleon Smith.
Priscilla smiled at the General as he emerged from the hands of Jane, "red and scurfy," just as he had said. She smiled meaningly and aggravatingly, so that Napoleon was reduced to shaking his clenched fist covertly at her.
"Wait till I get you out," he said, using the phrase time-honoured by such occasions.
Priscilla Smith only smiled more meaningly still. "First catch your hare!" she said under her breath.
Napoleon Smith stalked in to lunch, the children's dinner at the house of Windy Standard, with an expression of fixed and Byronic gloom on his face, which was only lightened by the sight of his favourite pigeon-pie (with a lovely crust) standing on the side-board.
"Say grace, Hugh John," commanded his father.
And General Napoleon Smith said grace with all the sweet innocence of a budding angel singing in the cherub choir, aiming at the same time a kick at his sister underneath the table, which overturned a footstool and damaged the leg of a chair.
CHAPTER II THE GOSPEL OF DASHT-MEAN
ITBut Hugh John loved the great thoroughfare, deserted though it was. To his mind there could be no loneliness upon its eye-taking stretches, for who knew but out of the dust there might come with a clatter Mr. Dick Turpin, late of York and Tyburn; Robert the Bruce, charging south into England with his Galloway garrons, to obtain some fresh English beef wherewithal to feed his scurvy Scots; or (best of all) his Majesty King George's mail-coach Highflyer, the picture of which, coloured and blazoned, hung in his father's workroom.