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Cheese, butter, firewood, soap, pickles, matches, bacon, table-beer, peg-tops, sweetmeats, boys' kites, bird-seed, cold ham, birch brooms, hearth- stones, salt, vinegar, blacking, red-herrings, stationery, lard, mushroom-ketchup, staylaces, loaves of bread, shuttlecocks, eggs, and slate pencil; everything was fish that came to the net of this greedy little shop, and all articles were in its net.
They think Mount Peter Botte is the highest mountain in the world, and if you show one of them a picture of Milan Cathedral he will swell up with satisfaction and say that the idea of that jungle of spires was stolen from the forest of peg-tops and toothpicks that makes the roofs of Curepipe look so fine and prickly. "There is not much trade in books.
Day by day he grows in conceit, neglects his temper, especially at home, with a wife who is worth ten of him and all his 'works, and generally behaves, as the phrase goes, 'as if anything becomes him. If you visit him en famille, you will find him especially characteristic at meals, during which he is wont to sit absorbed, with an air of 'I cannot shake off the god'; and when they are over he goes off, moodily chewing a toothpick, to his den, where, maybe, the genius finds vent in a dissertation on 'Peg-Tops, for The Boy's Own, or 'The Noses of Great Men, for Chambers' Journal.
Sure you couldn't use a sip of brandy where it'd do the most good?" "Sure." "Well, then, cut out the weeps and get your beauty sleep, kid. He ain't worth sobbing over, anyway, believe me." "He!" snorted Gertie indignantly. "You're cold. There never was anything in peg-tops that could make me carry on like the heroine of the Elsie series." "Lost your job?" "No such luck."
Black letter, early printed, first editions Elizabethan and Victorian, every poor fly ambered in large paper, etc. etc.; in short, he ran through the gamut of that craze which takes its turn in due time with marbles, peg-tops, beetles, and foreign stamps with probably the two exceptions of Bewick, for whom he could never batter up an enthusiasm, and 'facetiae. These latter needed too much camphor, he used to say.
Many are like our own, and marbles, peg-tops, leap-frog or kite-flying each have their turn, while in the ditches and puddles the boys hold miniature regattas with their toy sailing-boats. In the monastery or some private dwelling in the village the children go to school, and as they become older some occupation employs their time.
The men in return caught them by one hand, and spun them round and round four or five times, and then let them go, when they whirled down the grassy slope for many yards, spinning like peg-tops, and only keeping their feet by the greatest efforts or good-luck.
They think Mount Peter Botte is the highest mountain in the world, and if you show one of them a picture of Milan Cathedral he will swell up with satisfaction and say that the idea of that jungle of spires was stolen from the forest of peg-tops and toothpicks that makes the roofs of Curepipe look so fine and prickly. "There is not much trade in books.
The boy who finds his father eager to talk over the game, to discuss the merits of peg-tops, to walk, row, play, and work with him, finds it as simple and natural to talk with him over his moral and religious questionings as it is to talk over the daily happenings. To live with the boy is to find the youth with you. But it is hard work discovering your young men if you lost your boys.
'E 'ad one little game 'e loved best of all not marbles, it wasn't, nor peg-tops but there, I won't tell you what it was, for you'd laugh like the gal at the shop did when I spoke of it. I don't often get talkin', but I'd 'ad a nip of brandy at the time.
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