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A pile of milk-cans balanced on the river's edge, and on the chance of finding the inventor's remains, I tipped them into the stream. Underneath, stretched on the cold, unsympathetic ground, his feet dabbling idly in the water, his clothes in a hundred shreds, a great lump on his brow, was Hawkins, stunned and bleeding! As I turned to summon Brotherton, Hawkins opened his eyes.
"I am so afraid you will get cold, with nothing upon your arms and shoulders," he said. "Creep close to me, and perhaps the drizzle won't hurt you much. I should be sorrier still if I did not think that the rain might be helping me." She imperceptibly crept closer, and he wrapped round them both a large piece of sail-cloth, which was sometimes used to keep the sun off the milk-cans.
The woman took out from where it was secreted in her dress, a bladder containing spirits; she opened the mouth of it, and poured out a portion into one of the milk-cans; having drunk herself, she handed it to me, but not feeling inclined, and being averse to spirits, I rejected it, "Not just now," said I, "by-and-by perhaps."
I did not mean to steal the bicycle; I was merely trying to be useful. The train was on the point of starting when I noticed, as I thought, Harris's bicycle still in the goods van. No one was about to help me. I jumped into the van and hauled it out, only just in time. Wheeling it down the platform in triumph, I came across Harris's bicycle, standing against a wall behind some milk-cans.
There was a bench outside the kitchen door at The Cedars, a slant-legged, unpainted bench which at one time had been used to hold milk-cans. Wade settled himself on this in company with several dozen glasses of currant jelly. From his position he could look in at the kitchen door upon Eve and Miss Mullett, who, draped from chin to toes in blue-checked aprons, were busy over the summer preserving.
"Nothing has been disturbed;" he swept his arm around comprehensively "papers and so forth you can examine at leisure." Presently we quitted that house upon which the fateful Chinaman had set his seal, as the suburb was awakening to a new day. The clank of milk-cans was my final impression of the avenue to which a dreadful minister of death had come at the bidding of the death lord.
"And Jane gets breakfast, and gets up the three little children, and washes 'em and dresses 'em, and feeds the little ones to the table. And after breakfast she does up all her work, washes her dishes and the immense milk-cans, sweeps, cleans lamps and stoves, makes beds, etcetry, and feeds the chickens, and ducks, and turkeys. And by that time it is nine o'clock.
The manyspeckled fowls were pecking about in the farmyard beyond, and the milk-cans glittered with brightness, hung out to sweeten. The court was so full of flowers that they crept out upon the low-covered wall and horse-mount, and were even to be found self-sown upon the turf that bordered the path to the back of the house.
"I'd love to lie in a garden with flowers, and the bees humming, and no noise of rattling carts and milk-cans. Oh, Jessie!" but to his dismay Jessie buried her face in her hands and burst into tears. "I can't stay here," she cried, "I can't, I can't! I must go home. I shall die if I don't go home to granp," and she sobbed and sobbed until Charlie was quite frightened.
The brilliant lights of the station, combined with the yellow fog rolling in from the various entrances; the onward rush of many feet, as hundreds of busy men and eager young women poured out of suburban trains, hurrying to the scenes which called for their energy during the whole of the coming day; the gliding in and out of trains, the passing to and fro of porters, wheeling heavy luggage; the clang of milk-cans, the hoot of taxi-cabs, and, beyond it all, the distant roar of London, awaking, and finding its way about heavily, like an angry old giant in the fog all seemed to Ronnie to be but another of the queer nightmares which came to him now with exhausting frequency.
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