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"It seems hours to me, my daughter, whilst the money is chinking and the clergyman is speaking, and the ten pieces of gold is getting so hot in my hands, I fancies they burns me, and still not one of the collecting-men comes near our pew.
The window was truly worthy of a mediæval castle, for it was simply an oblong hole, boxed in with a casement made from some scraps of boards, while a slab shutter, swung on leather hinges, shut out the elements. The chinking was a simple matter, and when it was all done, including a doorway into the main room, Robin was unfeignedly delighted.
Was she not his goods, his chattels, bought with a price, as much as a horse at a fair? That nothing might be wanting to remind her of the sordid bargain, Mr. Whitelaw drew a small canvas bag from his pocket presently a bag which gave forth that pleasant chinking sound that is sweet to the ears of so many as the music of gold and handed it across the hearth to William Carley.
Our sleeping room has no canvas on the walls inside, and much of the chinking has fallen out, leaving big holes, and I never have a light in that room after dark, fearing that Indians might shoot me through those holes. They are skulking about the post all the time. We have another cook now a soldier of course and one that is rather inexperienced.
She had a white cloth on her table, albeit the table seemed to have much ado to stand alone since its legs were of unequal length, and white counterpanes on her beds, and gay curtains at the windows opening within the stockade the other side had but loop-holes on which birds of splendid plumage, cut from East Indian chintz, had been overcast on the white dimity, and which looked when the wind stirred them, for there was no glass and only a batten shutter, as if all the winged denizens of the brilliant tropics were seeking entrance to this happy bower; the room had an added woodland suggestion because of the bark adhering to the logs of the walls, for the timbers of these primitive houses were unhewn, although the daubing and the chinking were stout and close, and with the aid of the great flaring fires stood off Jack Frost with a very valiant bluff.
As it is they merely notch the logs at the corners, leaving wide spaces to be filled up with splits, rocks, mud anything to keep out the weather. As a matter of fact, few houses ever are thoroughly chinked and he who would take pains to make a workmanlike job of chinking would be ridiculed as "fussin' around like an old granny-woman." Nobody but a tenderfoot feels drafts, you know.
By what process these serfs of a rural hamlet had grown into the busy burgesses whom we saw rustling their parchments and chinking their silver marks in the ears of Abbot Sampson in Richard's time, it is hard to say. Like all the greater revolutions of society, this advance was a silent one. The more galling and oppressive instances of serfdom seem to have slipped unconsciously away.
We saw a row of narrow, slattern cottages, their backs over the sea, and in front of them marched to and fro a magnificent soldier laced in gold, with chinking spurs and a rifle. Suddenly there ran out of a cottage two little girls, aged about four years and eight years, dirty, unkempt, delicious, shrill, their movements full of the ravishing grace of infancy.
The diamond nose-stud that takes the place of the Western patch in drawing attention to the curve of the nostril, the gold ornament in the centre of the forehead studded with tallow-drop emeralds and flawed rubies, the heavy circlet of beaten gold that was fastened round her neck by the softness of the pure metal, and the chinking curb-patterned silver anklets hanging low over the rosy ankle-bone.
'It is most demnebly particular, said Mr Mantalini. 'It is to melt some scraps of dirty paper into bright, shining, chinking, tinkling, demd mint sauce. Newman uttered a significant grunt, and taking Mr Mantalini's proffered card, limped with it into his master's office.
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