Mountain Moggy | Page 5

send his ship on the rocks," remarked Arthur.
"She'd better not have tried to do it, or we'd pay her off for it," said Willie, as if speaking of some heroic purpose.
"But I thought you said that she couldn't be killed; and if she couldn't be killed, she couldn't be hurt, I should think," observed Arthur, who was called the philosopher of the family.
"Well, I don't know: they say witches can't be killed, and that Old Polly Forty Rags has lived hundreds and hundreds of years," said Willie, justly considered the most thoughtless of the family. "Nothing does hurt her either. You can't think what fun it is to hear the stones bounce against her, just as if she was made of straw. If anything could hurt her, I know a big stone I sent in at her window this evening would have given her a cracker she wouldn't forget in a hurry. It's my belief that she didn't care for it more than she would if it had been a pea out of a pea-shooter."
Anna's attention was again drawn to her brother's whispered conversation. "What are you saying about throwing stones?" she asked. "At whom have you been throwing stones?"
"Why at old Mountain Moggy, of course, or Polly Forty Rags as they call her. Who else should I throw at? She's as hard as she is wicked; and they say she has a whole suit of elephant's skin under her rags, and that's one of the reasons the stones don't hurt her."
Anna had been so busy examining some little three-cornered Cape of Good Hope stamps, that she had not till now clearly comprehended what Willie was speaking about.
"You throw stones at Mountain Moggy!" she said in an incredulous tone.
"Of course we do, and awful fun we had this very evening," answered William, boldly. "We heard them go in at the window and thump against the old witch. The clock struck, and we had to run away, or we should have given her more of it. But it was just as well that we were off, for some of the fellows saw her lighting up her house for her witcheries, and there's no doubt but that she'd have sent down some of her imps after us if we hadn't made good use of our legs to get off."
"What do you really mean, Willie?" said Anna, now quite interested. "You cannot tell me that you have been stoning that poor miserable old woman on the mountain?"
"Haven't we though," said Willie, carelessly, crossing his arms on the table and beginning to pore over his book.
"Willie says that she's a wicked black witch, with red eyes and a blue tongue," remarked little Mabel.
"Don't stuff the little ones' heads with such abominable nonsense, Will," said Charles, looking up from his book. "There's nothing I hate to hear so much; it's wrong, and you have no business to do it."
"No, indeed; it's very wrong to tell stories about her, even in fun," remarked Anna.
"Nonsense and stories, indeed!" cried Willie, indignantly. "They are neither one nor the other. If she isn't black she's near it; and I never said she had red eyes and a blue tongue; but if you two were to hear her screech and howl, as I have, you'd confess fast enough that she was a witch." And Willie turned back to his book with the air of an injured person.
Poor boy, he had not had the advantages of his brothers and sisters, though worldly people would have said that his prospects were far better than theirs. They had been carefully trained in the way they should walk from their earliest days by their parents, who, though not possessed of worldly wealth, felt that they might yet give them the richest of heritages. William had not, like the others, been brought up entirely by his parents. His godmother, Miss Ap Reece, had offered to leave him her property, provided she might have entire charge of him, and his parents somewhat hastily consented. By her he had been well fed and well clothed, but not well educated. She was capricious, fond of gossip, and self-indulgent; and continually she would, in order to be rid of him, send him down amongst the servants, who, as her country residence was in a remote village, were more than usually ignorant. There he imbibed many of their prejudices, and learned to believe in many of their superstitions. Meanwhile, happily, the good seed sown in his earlier days was not entirely eradicated, though he and his brothers and sisters always exhibited in their subsequent lives the different systems of cultivation to which they had been subjected. The residence of William with Miss Ap Reece was brought to an abrupt termination by the failure of the County Bank, in which most