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"Whither away, so late?" said the barber, whom they passed seated with his starveling boys round a mess of stockfish and parsnips, in the shop below. "If I were to tell you, Gaffer," said the dame, with most contemptuous coolness, "I do not think you could do my errand, so I will e'en keep it to myself."
His boots were broken; the trousers, a grey, dirty brown, were torn as high up as the ankle; they had been mended and the patches hardly held together; the frock coat, green with age, with huge flaps over the pockets, frayed and torn, and many sizes too large, hung upon his starveling body. He seemed very feeble, and there was neither light nor expression in his glassy, watery eyes.
I can hardly believe this abnormal cruelty to be the mere result of uncivilization; it appears to me the effect of an arrested development, which leaves to the man all the ferocity of the carnivor, the unreflecting cruelty of the child. The dietary of these "wild men of the woods" would astonish the starveling sons of civilization.
"I am at work. I need these figures. I am to speak to-night at Poplar." "Put them away!" Aaron Thurnbrein cried. "Soon you and I will be needed no more. A greater than we have known is here here in London!" The older man looked up, for a moment, as though puzzled. Then a light broke suddenly across his face, a light which seemed somehow to become reflected in the face of the starveling youth.
Both hated priests, and both hated Spaniards. Wakening from their apathetic misery, the starveling garrison hailed him as a deliverer. Yet Hawkins secretly rejoiced when he learned their purpose to abandon Florida; for although, not to tempt his cupidity, they hid from him the secret of their Appalachian gold mine, he coveted for his royal mistress the possession of this rich domain.
As in previous instances, observing that the interloper had a voice fully capable of making his wants known, I gave the comfortable little beast ample room to spread himself on the ground, and let the lone little starveling survivor of the rightful brood have his cot all to himself.
But the sight of the starveling little fir tree reminded us that in the school hospital lay two sick boys whose roseate dreams of London and holidays had suddenly changed to the knowledge that weeks of isolation and imprisonment behind the window-blind with the red cross lay before them. If we could not give them the longed-for home Christmas, we could at least give them a Christmas-tree.
They were probably most of them serious, but some of the younger ones recognized the bouffe quality of their calling. One pleasant starveling of ten or twelve entreated us for bread with a cigarette in his mouth, and, being rewarded for his impudence, entered into the spirit of the affair and asked for more, just as if we had given nothing.
The soil around it, as if too sacred to be invaded by the profane feet of the multitude, was left overgrown with weeds and starveling bushes; and an ancient elm, rising among them, and flinging its shadowy branches wide around, stood like a giant watchman, to repel the gaze of the curious.
There was just room between the fringe of reed and the belt of rock around it, for a man going very carefully to escape that horrible pit-hole. And so I went round to the other side, and there found open space enough, with stunted bushes, and starveling trees, and straggling tufts of rushes.
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