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As we sat smoking, whittling, and quizzing the patriots, a side-door of the coffeehouse was suddenly opened, and an officer came out whose appearance was calculated to give us a far more favourable opinion of South American militaires.
Means of transit were developing to carry the moderately prosperous middle-class families out of London, education and factory employment were whittling away at the supply of rough, hardworking, obedient girls who would stand the subterranean drudgery of these places, new classes of hard-up middle-class people such as my uncle, employees of various types, were coming into existence, for whom no homes were provided.
These appeared, as the Americans say, in "full blast," during the few hours which I spent on Lake Champlain. There were about a hundred passengers, including a sprinkling of the fair sex. The amusements were story-telling, whittling, and smoking.
The boy was sitting in a disconsolate little heap by the roadside, whittling half-heartedly at a small stick. "Hullo," smiled Pollyanna, engagingly. The boy glanced up, but he looked away again, at once. "Hullo yourself," he mumbled. Pollyanna laughed. "Now you don't look as if you'd be glad even for calf's-foot jelly," she chuckled, stopping before him.
He forgot his promise, and down he went to the pond; where he cut his stick, and was whittling the end, when he saw a boat by the shore. It was untied, and oars lay in it, as if waiting for some one to come and row out. "I'll just take a little pull across, and get those cardinal-flowers for Polly," he said; and went to the boat.
But force of habit is everything, and after the very wise saying recorded above, he resumed his whittling, never again looking up until the loud blast of the driver's horn was heard on the distant hill-top, where the four weary, jaded horses were now visible.
While waiting for his coffee nobody in the house had felt like breakfast he had taken a chair at the southeast end of the front porch and, pulling a piece of soft wood and a knife from his Gargantuan coat-pockets, had fallen to whittling and thinking. Whittling, he often said, enabled him to think clearly; it was to him what tobacco was to other men.
"Rosalind," said George, "the best plan is certainly to wait until Leslie returns, which will be either to-morrow or the next day. We will then determine upon what course to pursue. Perhaps we shall be undisturbed until that time. If not, it cannot be helped." "Wished dis pusson warn't so hungry," remarked Zeb, picking up a stick and whittling it.
They verified their instructions from a boy who was standing in the farmyard, whittling a stick, and trudged away over a stubble field and through a turnstile gate. It was quite pretty along the path by the river. There was a tall hedge where hips and haws showed red, and a grassy border where a few wild flowers still bloomed.
The great and wise Charles Reade tells how his hero, who had an island, a treasure ship, and a few other trifles of the sort to dispose of, insisted upon Captain Fullalove's throwing away the stick he was whittling, as giving the captain an unfair advantage.
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