< previous  next > 

2

sturdy, broad-faced young fellow who had first spoken, as he picked up a wooden lever used for turning over the great sugar-hogsheads lying in the yard, and hoisting them into a trolly, or beneath the crane which raised them into the warehouse. "Lookye here, Mike Bannock, I never did knock a man down with this here wooden bar, but if you gets stirring Mas' Don again, has it you do, right across the back. Spang!"

"Be quiet, Jem, and put the bar down," said Lindon Lavington, a dark, well set-up lad of seventeen, as he sat upon the head of a sugar-hogshead with his arms folded, slowly swinging his legs.

"No, I sha'n't put the bar down, Mas' Don. Your uncle left me in charge of the yard, and--what yer sitting on the sugar-barrel for when there's a 'bacco hogshead close by? Now just you feel how sticky you are."

Don got off the barrel, and made a face, as he proved with one hand the truth of the man's words, and then rubbed his treacly fingers against the warehouse wall.

"Your mother'll make a row about that, just as my Sally does when I get molasses on my clothes."

"You should teach her to lick it off, Jemmy Wimble," said the rough-looking, red-faced labourer, who had lowered down a sugar-hogshead so rapidly, that he had been within an inch of making it unnecessary to write Don Lavington's life, from the fact of there being no life to write.

"You mind your own business, Mike," said Jem, indignantly.

"That's what I'm a-doing of, and a-waiting for orders, Mr Jem Wimble. He's hen-pecked, Mas' Don, that what's the matter with him. Been married only three months, and he's hen-pecked. Haw-haw-haw! Poor old cock-bird! Hen-pecked! Haw-haw-haw!"

Jem Wimble, general worker in the warehouse and yard of Josiah Christmas, West India merchant, of River Street, Bristol, gave Mike the labourer an angry look, as he turned as red as a blushing girl.

"Lookye here," he cried angrily, as Don, who had reseated himself, this time on a hogshead crammed full of compressed tobacc

 < previous  next >