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I had come down early enough, and watched through the drawing-room blind the cleansing of all the steps in the street but ours. Yet Raffles had evidently been up some time; the house seemed far purer than overnight as though he had managed to air it room by room; and from the one with the gas-stove there came a frizzling sound that fattened the heart.
"Ay, lad, and a big cow too. You go in and make up the fire while we cut off enough meat for supper." The fact that they had eaten a meal but half an hour before, went for nothing; slices of bear-meat were soon frizzling, and as hearty a meal was eaten as if no food had been tasted since the previous day.
Periodic fits of depression and of almost sordid avarice showed that he was still the same person as the boy of fifteen who had spent those three months unwashed, unkempt, in savage squalor, by his fireside; and fits of brutal and almost maniac violence, as when, because a hair was sharply pulled out by the roots during the elaborate process of frizzling, he cut open with a blow of a heavy silver candlestick the temple of his faithful valet Elia, who had nursed him like a mother, and whose only revenge, after this fearful scene, was to keep the two handkerchiefs steeped with his blood as a memorial and a warning to his master.
But Little Lasse did not trouble his head with such things; he gathered together his boats and walked up the shore back to the house. His brother and sister ran to meet him, and called out from the distance, 'Where have you been so long, Lasse? Come home and get some bread-and-butter. The kitchen door stood open, and inside was heard a strange frizzling.
If the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb, what is the provision of Nature which enables so tender a thing as a young bird, a mere helpless ball of creamy fluff, to withstand the frizzling heat with which the sun bleaches the broken coral?
He lay there for a long time quite still, and he still heard the frying-pan frizzling at home of the fire, the frizzling was very plain, Little Lasse heard it quite near him; and so he woke up and rubbed his eyes. There he lay in the boat, where he had fallen asleep.
The wind had turned, and the boat had drifted out with one wind and drifted in with another while Little Lasse slept, and what Lasse thought was frizzling in a frying-pan was the low murmur of the waves as they washed against the stones on the shore. But he was not altogether wrong, for the clear blue sea is like a great pan in which God's sun all day makes cakes for good children.
I've been frizzling in it for the past six months, more or less; ever since I came home with the one sole, single determination to climb out of the panic ditch if I had to make steps of dead bodies or lost souls. I'm doing it, and I'm paying the price.
I see myself now in my small bedroom, my elbows planted on the shaky, one-legged table, startled every now and again by the frizzling of my hair coming in contact with the solitary candle. On cold nights I wear my overcoat, turned up about the neck, a blanket round my legs, and often I must sit with my fingers in my ears, the better to shut out the sounds of life, rising importunately from below.
Out of it, infinitely far, yet comparatively close, a few stars were beginning to wink. The men in the yard were cooking their evening meal over a few little fires, squatting over them, eyeing anxiously the brewing tea or frizzling bacon. It was impossible to feel nervous or discontented. The very atmosphere was benign. It seemed as if "God was in His Heaven," and all was well with the World.
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