Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished

Diamonds Cut and Polished, by
R.M. Ballantyne

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Title: Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished A Tale of City Arab Life and
Adventure
Author: R.M. Ballantyne
Release Date: June 7, 2007 [EBook #21729]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DUSTY
DIAMONDS CUT AND POLISHED ***

Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England

Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished
by R.M. Ballantyne.

First published 1884
CHAPTER ONE.
AN ACCIDENT AND SOME OF ITS CURIOUS RESULTS.
Every one has heard of those ponies--those shaggy, chubby,
innocent-looking little creatures--for which the world is indebted, we
suppose, to Shetland.
Well, once on a time, one of the most innocent-looking, chubbiest, and
shaggiest of Shetland ponies--a dark brown one--stood at the door of a
mansion in the west-end of London.
It was attached to a wickerwork vehicle which resembled a large
clothes-basket on small wheels. We do not mean, of course, that the
pony was affectionately attached to it. No; the attachment was
involuntary and unavoidable, by reason of a brand-new yellow leather
harness with brass buckles. It objected to the attachment, obviously, for
it sidled this way, and straddled that way, and whisked its enormous
little tail, and tossed its rotund little head, and stamped its ridiculously
small feet; and champed its miniature bit, as if it had been a war-horse
of the largest size, fit to carry a Wallace, a Bruce, or a Richard of the
Lion-heart, into the midst of raging battle.
And no wonder; for many months had not elapsed since that brown
creature had kicked up its little heels, and twirled its tail, and shaken its
shaggy mane in all the wild exuberance of early youth and unfettered
freedom on the heather hills of its native island.
In the four-wheeled basket sat a little girl whom it is useless to describe
as beautiful. She was far beyond that! Her delicate colour, her little
straight nose, her sparkling teeth, her rosebud of a mouth, her enormous
blue eyes, and floods of yellow hair--pooh! these are not worth
mentioning in the same sentence with her expression. It was that which
carried all before it, and swept up the adoration of
man-and-woman-kind as with the besom of fascination.

She was the only child of Sir Richard Brandon. Sir Richard was a
knight and a widower. He was knighted, not because of personal merit,
but because he had been mayor of some place, sometime or other, when
some one connected with royalty had something important to do with it!
Little Diana was all that this knight and widower had on earth to care
for, except, of course, his horses and dogs, and guns, and club, and food.
He was very particular as to his food. Not that he was an epicure, or a
gourmand, or luxurious, or a hard drinker, or anything of that sort--by
no means. He could rough it, (so he said), as well as any man, and put
up with whatever chanced to be going, but, when there was no occasion
for roughing it, he did like to see things well cooked and nicely served;
and wine, you know, was not worth drinking--positively nauseous--if it
was not of the best.
Sir Richard was a poor man--a very poor man. He had only five
thousand a year--a mere pittance; and he managed this sum in such a
peculiar way that he never had anything wherewith to help a struggling
friend, or to give to the poor, or to assist the various religious and
charitable institutions by which he was surrounded; while at certain
intervals in the year he experienced exasperating difficulty in meeting
the demands of those torments to society, the tradespeople--people who
ought to be ashamed of themselves for not being willing to supply the
nobility and gentry with food and clothing gratuitously! Moreover, Sir
Richard never by any chance laid anything by.
Standing by the pony's head, and making tender efforts to restrain his
waywardness, stood a boy--a street boy--a city Arab. To a Londoner
any description of this boy would be superfluous, but it may be well to
state, for the benefit of the world at large, that the class to which he
belonged embodies within its pale the quintessence of rollicking
mischief, and the sublimate of consummate insolence.
This remarkable boy was afflicted with a species of dance--not that of
Saint Vitus, but a sort of double-shuffle, with a stamp of the right foot
at the end--in which he