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Every day some regiment or other would march through the town, and at the first sound of its music Amenda would become restless and excited. The Pied Piper's reed could not have stirred the Hamelin children deeper than did those Sandgate bands the heart of our domestic.
Can't have the roadway blocked up all the afternoon with this 'ere demonstration of the unloved. Pass along." In connection with this same barracks, our char-woman told Amenda, who told Ethelbertha, who told me a story, which I now told the boys. Into a certain house, in a certain street in the neighbourhood, there moved one day a certain family.
"And do you know that it's now nearly nine?" "Yes'm." "Well, isn't breakfast ready?" "No, mum." "Will it ever be ready?" "Well, mum," replied Amenda, in a tone of genial frankness, "to tell you the truth, I don't think it ever will." "What's the reason? Won't the fire light?" "Oh yes, it lights all right." "Well, then, why can't you cook the breakfast?"
"What do you think you are?" she cried, balancing accounts by boxing his ears first on one side and then on the other, "a torpedo! What are you doing here at all? What do you want?" "I don't want nothin'," explained the boy, rubbing his head; "I've brought a gent down." "A gent?" said Amenda, looking round, but seeing no one. "What gent?"
The moment the girl opened the door, Ethelbertha burst out with: "Oh! can you swim, Amenda?" "No, mum," answered Amenda, with entire absence of curiosity as to why such a question had been addressed to her, "I never knew but one girl as could, and she got drowned."
During the first journey the 'bus conductor stared at Amenda; during the second he talked to her, during the third he gave her a cocoanut, during the fourth he proposed to her, and was promptly accepted. After that, Amenda was enabled to visit her cheesemonger without expense. He was a quaint character himself, this 'bus conductor. I often rode with him to Fleet Street.
Does Amenda think that I can ever forget him, because I do not write? in fact, never have written to him? as if the memory of our friends could only thus be preserved! The best man I ever knew has a thousand times recurred to my thoughts! Two persons alone once possessed my whole love, one of whom still lives, and you are now the third. How can my remembrance of you ever fade?
"Because before you can turn yourself round it goes out again." Amenda never volunteered statements. She answered the question put to her and then stopped dead. I called downstairs to her on one occasion, before I understood her peculiarities, to ask her if she knew the time. She replied, "Yes, sir," and disappeared into the back kitchen. At the end of thirty seconds or so, I called down again.
They afforded a still stronger example of the influence exercised by Tommy Atkins upon the British domestic, and I therefore thought it right to relate them. "The heroine of them," I said, "is our Amenda. Now, you would call her a tolerably well-behaved, orderly young woman, would you not?" "She is my ideal of unostentatious respectability," answered MacShaughnassy.
"The moment we reached home Ethelbertha looked for Amenda, and I looked for my hat. Neither were to be found. "Nine o'clock struck, ten o'clock struck. At half-past ten, we went down and got our own supper, and had it in the kitchen. At a quarter-past eleven, Amenda returned. She walked into the kitchen without a word, hung my hat up behind the door, and commenced clearing away the supper things.
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