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The famous bards, and story-tellers and harpists would not come until noon-time when the business of the fair would have abated, but with the crowd of beggars came ballad-singers, and the tellers of the stories that were called "Go-by-the-Market-Stake," because they were told around the stake in the market place and were very common.
A Chinese girl of 14 was brought to this country, and served six months as a domestic slave, and was then put into a brothel. She was rescued. Her Chinese master got out a writ of habeas corpus, went to the Mission with an officer and took the girl away at once to court before a corrupt judge. It was just at noon-time, and the missionary pleaded for a little time in which to summon a lawyer.
I caught Britton whistling in the kitchen about noon-time, and severely reprimanded him. We went quite to the extreme, however, when we tiptoed about our lofty halls. All of the afternoon we kept a sharp lookout for the doctor, but if he came we were none the wiser.
Slatternly girls and women abounded, and little babies carried about by a little larger babies, and of course kissed on their successive layers of dirt. There were also many small boys who, I hope, were not so wicked as they were ragged. At noon-time they hung much about the windows of cookshops which one would think their sharp hunger would have pierced to the steaming and smoking dishes within.
The ladies went down the mossy steps, leading from the gallery to the further shore, and, lying under the oaks, whiled away the noon-time by re-peopling the spot with the shapes that used to inhabit it.
"Oh, Judy, Judy," she cried, "how did you make it look like this? I have never seen anything like it. Never." From where they stood they seemed to look out over the sea a sea roughened by a fresh wind, so that tumbling whitecaps showed on the tops of the green waves. Not a ship was to be seen, not a gull swept across the hazy noon-time skies.
Then our soldiers, seeing that the Portuguese were attacking them and had begun hostilities, determined to complete their defenses, and fought with the Portuguese from about noon-time until sunset, without any cannon-shots being fired at the Portuguese from this camp.
It was not unusual, during the noon-time rush of self-centred individuals, for the legless man to get himself stridden into and bowled clean over upon his face or back, since nothing is more loosening to purse-strings than the average man's horror at having injured some creature already maimed; nor was it unusual for him at such times to scramble up smiling with a kind of invincible cheerfulness that more potently stirred the generosity of the man who had knocked him down than ever groans and complaints could have done.
No youthful constitution was proof against the speed with which they disposed of these fresh soft sandwiches at noon-time, and gulped down their tea. In ten minutes some of them were ready to hurry off into sunny Front Street, there to saunter past warehouses, and warehouses, and warehouses, with lounging men eyeing them from open doorways.
He consulted his friend Jerry, who, being a radical, might have some touch-stone by which to test the stranger. Jerry sought him out at noon-time, and came back and reported that he was as much in the dark as Hal. Either the man was an agitator, seeking to "start something," or else he was a detective sent in by the company.
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