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After this, as hardly need be told, his one desire was to get out of the house with his shilling before they discovered their mistake, and it was well that they were unsuspicious people, for he was making strange hissing sounds in his throat, the result of trying hard to keep his sniggers under control. There were many ways in which Tommy could have disposed of his shilling.
"Only infinite physically," said the little priest, turning sharply in his seat, "not infinite in the sense of escaping from the laws of truth." Valentin behind his tree was tearing his fingernails with silent fury. He seemed almost to hear the sniggers of the English detectives whom he had brought so far on a fantastic guess only to listen to the metaphysical gossip of two mild old parsons.
A coward always sniggers when insulted, pretending that the insult is only a joke of his opponent, and therefore to be laughed aside. So he escapes the quarrel which he fears a show of displeasure might provoke. But though Wilson was not a hardy man, it was not timidity only that caused his tame submission to Gourlay.
Witness the mill on fire in 'The Cloister and the Hearth'; the lark in exile in 'Never too Late to Mend'; the boat-race in 'Hard Cash'; the scene of Kate Peyton at the firelit window, and Griffith in the snow, in 'Griffith Gaunt. There are a thousand bursts of laughter in his pages, not mere sniggers, but lung-shaking laughters, and the man who can go by any one of a hundred pathetic passages without tears is a man to be pitied.
"Don't keep 'em," said the boy, and buried himself once more in his copy of "Spicy Sniggers." "I'll just look round," said Horace, and began to poke about with a sinking heart, and a horrid dread that he might have come to the wrong shop, for the big pot-bellied vessel certainly did not seem to be there. At last, to his unspeakable joy, he discovered it under a piece of tattered drugget.
When next the street-boy sorrowfully exclaims on your passing that 'it's no wonder the barbers all 'list for soldiers, or some puny idiot at your club a lilliputian model of popular 'manhood' sniggers to his friend behind his coffee as you come in: call to mind pictures of certain brave 'tailed men' of old, at the winking of whose eyelid your tiny club 'man' would have expired on the instant.
He shuffles up the inclined plane for more fish, amid the sniggers of spectators, for Toby's march has no claim to magnificence. It is curious to contrast the perfunctory affection with which Toby gets over the kiss and takes his reward, with the genuine fondness of his gaze after Sutton when he leaves with some fish remaining for other seals.
The nervous intensity, the despotic self-sufficiency of this easy and indifferent existence may expose us to taunts; but how sublimely ineffective the taunts which are never heard and which, if heard through echoing mischance, would provoke but serene smiles; for have we not avoided the aches of uniformity, the seriousness of prosperity, most of the trash of civilisation, and the scorn of Fortune when she sniggers?
"Fie, fie!" "What?" he sniggers. "A husband for you? The impudence of you! A 'husband'! Go along!" "Listen to me. I am tired of tramping." "Then go home." This time there ensues a long pause. Then the woman says very softly: "I have neither home nor kindred." "A lie!" ejaculates the young fellow. "No, by God it is not a lie! The Mother of God forget me if it is."
The poker-like gentleman sways a little unsteadily and sniggers. "Queer things do happen!" he continues. "I stepped out just after the second bell to get a glass of brandy. I got it, of course. Well, I thought, since it's a long way to the next station, it would be as well to have a second glass.
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