Pipes OPan at Zekesbury | Page 5

onto that position for a poet! Even Sweeney has fled from the sight
of him!"

And truly, too, it was a grotesque pose the young man had assumed;
not wholly ridiculous either, since the dwarfed position he had settled
into seemed more a genuine physical condition than an affected one.
The head, back-tilted, and sunk between the shoulders, looked
abnormally large, while the features of the face appeared peculiarly
child-like--especially the eyes--wakeful and wide apart, and very bright,
yet very mild and very artless; and the drawn and cramped outline of
the legs and feet, and of the arms and hands, even to the shrunken,
slender-looking fingers, all combined to most strikingly convey to the
pained senses the fragile frame and pixey figure of some pitiably
afflicted child, unconscious altogether of the pathos of its own
deformity.
"Now, mark the kuss, Horatio!" gasped my friend.
At first the speaker's voice came very low, and somewhat piping, too,
and broken--an eerie sort of voice it was, of brittle and erratic timbre
and undulant inflection. Yet it was beautiful. It had the ring of
childhood in it, though the ring was not pure golden, and at times fell
echoless. The spirit of its utterance was always clear and pure and crisp
and cheery as the twitter of a bird, and yet forever ran an undercadence
through it like a low-pleading prayer. Half garrulously, and like a
shallow brook might brawl across a shelvy bottom, the rhythmic little
changeling thus began:
"I'm thist a little crippled boy, an' never goin' to grow An' git a great big
man at all!--'cause Aunty told me so. When I was thist a baby one't I
falled out of the bed
An' got 'The Curv'ture of the Spine'--'at's what
the Doctor said. I never had no Mother nen--far my Pa run away
An'
dassn't come back here no more--'cause he was drunk one day An'
stobbed a man in thish-ere town, an' couldn't pay his fine! An' nen my
Ma she died--an' I got 'Curv'ture of the Spine!'"
A few titterings from the younger people in the audience marked the
opening stanza, while a certain restlessness, and a changing to more
attentive positions seemed the general tendency. The old Professor, in
the meantime, had sunk into one of the empty chairs. The speaker went

on with more gaiety:
"I'm nine years old! An' you can't guess how much I weigh, I bet!--
Last birthday I weighed thirty-three!--An' I weigh thirty yet! I'm awful
little far my size--I'm purt' nigh littler 'an
Some babies is!--an'
neighbors all calls me 'The Little Man!' An' Doc one time he laughed
an' said: 'I 'spect, first thing you know,
You'll have a little spike-tail
coat an' travel with a show!' An' nen I laughed--till I looked round an'
Aunty was a-cryin'-- Sometimes she acts like that, 'cause I got
'Curv'ture of the Spine!'"
Just in front of me a great broad-shouldered countryman, with a rainy
smell in his cumbrous overcoat, cleared his throat vehemently, looked
startled at the sound, and again settled forward, his weedy chin resting
on the knuckles of his hands as they tightly clutched the seat before
him. And it was like being taken into a childish confidence as the
quaint speech continued:
"I set--while Aunty's washin'--on my little long-leg stool, An' watch the
little boys an' girls 'a-skippin' by to school; An' I peck on the winder,
an' holler out an' say:
'Who wants to fight The Little Man 'at dares
you all to-day?' An' nen the boys climbs on the fence, an' little girls
peeks through,
An' they all says: 'Cause you're so big, you think we're
'feared o' you!'
An' nen they yell, an' shake their fist at me, like I
shake mine-- They're thist in fun, you know, 'cause I got 'Curv'ture of
the Spine!'"
"Well," whispered my friend, with rather odd irrelevance, I thought, "of
course you see through the scheme of the fellows by this time, don't
you?"
"I see nothing," said I, most earnestly, "but a poor little wisp of a child
that makes me love him so I dare not think of his dying soon, as he
surely must! There; listen!" And the plaintive gaiety of the homely
poem ran on:
"At evening, when the ironin's done, an' Aunty's fixed the fire, An'

filled an' lit the lamp, an' trimmed the wick an' turned it higher,
An'
fetched the wood all in far night, an' locked the kitchen door, An'
stuffed the ole crack where the wind blows in up through the floor--

She sets the kittle on the coals, an' biles an' makes the tea, An' fries the
liver an' the mush, an' cooks a egg far me; An' sometimes--when I
cough so hard--her elderberry wine
Don't go so bad far little boys
with 'Curv'ture of the Spine!'"
"Look!" whispered my friend,