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Three of the men were well-dressed and prosperous-looking; while the fourth, a shrivelled old fellow, in faded clothes which seemed several sizes too large for him, looked needy and ill-fed as he nervously chafed his thin bony hands.

The taste for drinking, so strange in a man brought up to the age of twenty-three among the proverbially sober Italians, had arisen in Charles Edward, a most excusable ill habit in one continually exposed to wet and cold, frequently sleeping on the damp ground, ill-fed, anxious, worn out by over-exertion in flying before his enemies, during those frightful months after the defeat at Culloden, when, with a price of thirty thousand pounds upon his head, he had lurked in the fastnesses of the Hebrides.

The sparrows had instant news of that, and the little winged beggars fluttered up to the lintels of certain deep-set casements, where ill-fed bairns scattered breakfasts of crumbs. Bobby watched all this without a movement. He shivered when the lodge door was heard to open and shut and heavy footsteps crunched on the gravel and snow around the church.

"It beats Banagher," says a jocular private in the Royal Irish, "how these Germans always disturb us at meal times. I suppose it's just the smell of the bacon that they're after, and Rafferty says we can't be too careful where we stow the mercies." From all accounts the Germans taken prisoner are about as ill-fed as they are ill-informed.

Each family owns several, and they are fed with rice usually in the evening; but they seem to be always hungry. The best of them are used for hunting; but besides these there is always a number of quite useless, ill-fed, ill-tempered curs; for no Kenyah dare kill a dog, however much he may wish to be rid of it. Still less, of course, will he eat the flesh of a dog.

"They are a merry couple," said the Tinker, "for one is as lean as an old wife's spindle, and the other as fat as a suet pudding." "Talking of fatness," said the Peddler, "thou thyself lookest none too ill-fed, holy friar." "Nay, truly," said Little John, "thou seest in me what the holy Saint Dunstan can do for them that serve him upon a handful of parched peas and a trickle of cold water."

"Oh, from Tangier," cried Mitchelbourne. The riddle was becoming clear. That extraordinary siege when a handful of English red-coats unpaid and ill-fed fought a breached and broken town against countless hordes for the honour of their King during twenty years, had not yet become the property of the historian. It was still an actual war in 1681.

But his ground is that the deer-forests which were denounced as unproductive have been proved to be the only mode of raising the condition and securing the well-being of the ill-fed population. If so, "humanitarians" are ready to hold up both hands in favour of deer-forests.

But it was only when someone was watching her that she did her work; at other times the cow-house was dirty, and the cows ill-fed and beaten, so that they kicked over the pail, and tried to butt her; and everyone said they had never seen such thin cows or such poor milk.

They took delight in repeating the tale, that they might witness his childish outbursts of passion and fury. This treatment had its desired effect; the boy developed into a rabid Jew-hater. As a child, Mikail was but a servant in the monastery, ill-treated and ill-fed.