Plain Tales from the Hills | Page 7

to weep over the eggs at breakfast.
Mrs. Hauksbee did her best to hold him in play, but, after two dances,
he crossed over to his wife and asked for a dance.
"I'm afraid you've come too late, MISTER Bremmil," she said, with her
eyes twinkling.
Then he begged her to give him a dance, and, as a great favor, she
allowed him the fifth waltz. Luckily 5 stood vacant on his programme.
They danced it together, and there was a little flutter round the room.
Bremmil had a sort of notion that his wife could dance, but he never
knew she danced so divinely. At the end of that waltz he asked for
another--as a favor, not as a right; and Mrs. Bremmil said: "Show me
your programme, dear!" He showed it as a naughty little schoolboy
hands up contraband sweets to a master. There was a fair sprinkling of
"H" on it besides "H" at supper. Mrs. Bremmil said nothing, but she
smiled contemptuously, ran her pencil through 7 and 9--two "H's"--and
returned the card with her own name written above--a pet name that
only she and her husband used. Then she shook her finger at him, and
said, laughing: "Oh, you silly, SILLY boy!"
Mrs. Hauksbee heard that, and--she owned as much--felt that she had
the worst of it. Bremmil accepted 7 and 9 gratefully. They danced 7,
and sat out 9 in one of the little tents. What Bremmil said and what Mrs.
Bremmil said is no concern of any one's.
When the band struck up "The Roast Beef of Old England," the two

went out into the verandah, and Bremmil began looking for his wife's
dandy (this was before 'rickshaw days) while she went into the
cloak-room. Mrs. Hauksbee came up and said: "You take me in to
supper, I think, Mr. Bremmil." Bremmil turned red and looked foolish.
"Ah--h'm! I'm going home with my wife, Mrs. Hauksbee. I think there
has been a little mistake." Being a man, he spoke as though Mrs.
Hauksbee were entirely responsible.
Mrs. Bremmil came out of the cloak-room in a swansdown cloak with a
white "cloud" round her head. She looked radiant; and she had a right
to.
The couple went off in the darkness together, Bremmil riding very
close to the dandy.
Then says Mrs. Hauksbee to me--she looked a trifle faded and jaded in
the lamplight: "Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a
clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool."
Then we went in to supper.

THROWN AWAY.
"And some are sulky, while some will plunge [So ho! Steady! Stand
still, you!] Some you must gentle, and some you must lunge. [There!
There! Who wants to kill you?] Some--there are losses in every trade--
Will break their hearts ere bitted and made, Will fight like fiends as the
rope cuts hard, And die dumb-mad in the breaking-yard."
Toolungala Stockyard Chorus.
To rear a boy under what parents call the "sheltered life system" is, if
the boy must go into the world and fend for himself, not wise. Unless
he be one in a thousand he has certainly to pass through many
unnecessary troubles; and may, possibly, come to extreme grief simply
from ignorance of the proper proportions of things.
Let a puppy eat the soap in the bath-room or chew a newly-blacked
boot. He chews and chuckles until, by and by, he finds out that
blacking and Old Brown Windsor make him very sick; so he argues
that soap and boots are not wholesome. Any old dog about the house
will soon show him the unwisdom of biting big dogs' ears. Being young,
he remembers and goes abroad, at six months, a well-mannered little
beast with a chastened appetite. If he had been kept away from boots,
and soap, and big dogs till he came to the trinity full-grown and with

developed teeth, just consider how fearfully sick and thrashed he would
be! Apply that motion to the "sheltered life," and see how it works. It
does not sound pretty, but it is the better of two evils.
There was a Boy once who had been brought up under the "sheltered
life" theory; and the theory killed him dead. He stayed with his people
all his days, from the hour he was born till the hour he went into
Sandhurst nearly at the top of the list. He was beautifully taught in all
that wins marks by a private tutor, and carried the extra weight of
"never having given his parents an hour's anxiety in his life." What he
learnt at Sandhurst beyond the regular routine is of no great
consequence. He looked about him, and he found soap and blacking, so
to speak, very good. He