Bob Strongs Holidays | Page 2

say!"
"`Nice' indeed!" replied he indignantly. "It is just like a girl to say that. I call it `jolly,' nothing more nor less. There's no other word to express what a fellow feels; and I do wonder, Nell, at your putting it so tamely!"
The girl laughed out merrily at this; and her smiling face, wreathed in dimples, expressed as much animation as her brother could have wished.
"Do forgive me, Bob," she cried. "You are quite right. It is `jolly,' the fields flying by, the trees all jumping up when you least expect them, the hills coming close, and--everything! I have noticed them all; for, I've been looking out, too, Master Observer, and have eyes like you, old chappie!"
"Ah, but you haven't seen all that I have," said Bob, mollified by Nellie's sympathetic accord. "Look at those little woolly lambs, there, frisking about, with their sedate old mothers standing by, watching the train with wondering eyes--"
"Yes, I see, I see," said she, interrupting him. "What great big eyes they have, to be sure! I declare, too, I can hear them `baa' above all the noise of the railway!"
Just at that moment, the engine gave a shriek of its steam-whistle, which startled the sheep and lambkins, sending them scuttling over to the other end of the field, in company with a number of skittish heifers and young colts, which kicked up their heels in such a funny way that Bob and Nellie both burst out laughing together in concert, in one burst as it were.
"Hullo, Nellie, look!" presently exclaimed Bob, who was the first to recover himself. "All the horses have not run away. There is one old fellow there, close to the line, who hasn't budged an inch."
"Perhaps he's the veteran of the field?" said Miss Nellie, rather poetically. "He's an old war-horse, maybe, who has heard too many clanging trumpet-calls and guns fired to be upset by the mere noise of an engine, which is only a bugbear to the ignorant."
"Bosh!" cried Bob, who did not believe much in sentiment, `flummery' he termed it. "Much more likely he's an old cart-horse, and is as well accustomed to the row of the railroad as he is to the plough, and that's the reason he took no notice of us as we dashed by. See, he's only a little dot in the distance now."
They were running along at such a rate that every object which in turn presented itself, first ahead of the train, then alongside and then behind, became speedily but `a dot in the distance,' to use Bob's words over again; the snugly secluded seats of the county gentry, the scattered villages and sparse red-roofed farmhouses, with their outposts of hayricks and herds of cattle and other stock, that one moment appeared and the next disappeared from view behind masses of foliage, all dancing a wild Sir Roger de Coverley sort of country dance, `down the valleys and over the hills,' until poor Nellie's eyes became quite dazed in watching them.
"Come over to the other window, Bob," she cried at length, turning round and getting up from her seat, suiting the action to the words, or at least trying to do so. "Let us cross over, Bob."
But, here a difficulty arose.
An old gentleman, who was the only other occupant of the carriage besides themselves, had dropped asleep over the newspaper which he had been reading, letting this slide down on his knees while he stretched out his legs right across the compartment, thus preventing Nellie from carrying out her intention.
"I can't get by," she whispered to Bob, who had also turned round from his window, and now giggled, grasping the situation. "I can't get by!"
"What, what?" ejaculated the old gentleman, suddenly waking up and clutching hold of his paper, as if afraid that some one was going to take it from him. "What, what did you say?"
Strangely enough, although Bob and his sister had been talking quite loudly before, nothing that they had said had roused their fellow- passenger until now, when, probably, Nellie's hushed voice led to this very undesirable result--just in the same way as a miller is said to sleep soundly amid all the clatter of the grinding wheels of his mill, his repose being only disturbed when the motion of the machinery stops. Poor Nellie hardly knew what to say now on the old gentleman, all at once, sitting bolt upright and addressing her so unexpectedly.
"I was only speaking to my brother," she managed to stammer out, after a little hesitating pause; "I am sorry to have awakened you, sir."
"Awakened me, eh?" snorted the old gentleman in a snappish tone. "Pooh, pooh, nonsense, girl! I wasn't a bit asleep. Heard every word you said. What was it you said, eh--what, what?"
Bob and Nellie exchanged a smile at