LITMIR.BIZ

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The sullen, heavy Sunday-school look went out of ​the boy's face. He forgot the discomfort of his Sunday clothes. It must be the soldiers on church parade! Then the sound grew like the voice of a thousand sirens singing in his ears.

      Still he faltered. He remembered the Sunday-school collection, and his story of Joseph, and the cold, green eyes, haunting and relentless, that watched him each morning to see that he did not take more than his share of porridge. He was dreadfully afraid of those cold, green eyes. But the fates were against Duncan Stewart McDougall.

      At that moment a new sound fell on his childish ears. It was the unfamiliar note of bagpipes, the mingled chant and drone of the band of Highland pipers. At that moment it was not the smell of the crowded slums that stole into his little Scottish nostrils. It was heather—the scent of heather, remembered as a dream of years ago.

      The sound awoke something dormant, ancestral, unconquerable, in his McDougall veins. Then it was he remembered watching Sandy McPherson, the Holland's ​coachman, pipe-clay his leggings while he talked of the "Chur-r-rch Par-r-ade a' Sabbath week."

      But still he faltered. He could not get the thought of those green eyes out of his mind. Then, all of a sudden, far up the street, he caught a glimpse of bonnets and kilts. Bonnets and kilts! And Scotland half a world away! It was a sight for sore eves, if those same eyes had once seen the hills and valleys of the Highlands. After one furtive glance down his own little street, the carefully folded lesson leaf was flung into the gutter, and he was piking up the avenue as fast as his thin legs could carry him. He headed them off in six blocks, and fell in, panting and perspiring, with the Victoria Rifles Band. One or two of the soldiers kicked him surreptitiously, but he did not even know it. He was following the band! The blood that throbbed through his thin legs had never run so fast. He was drunk, dead drunk, with the music. Thrills went coursing up and down his backbone, and he seemed to be walking on air. How or why it was he could not understand; but on and ​on he went. For seven enchanted miles he stuck to his band. His one sorrow was that his short legs could not keep in time with the music. But he could nearly almost do it, and by a sort of dot and carry one, he made a rhythm of his own in the marches. He pulled his peaked, puny little stooped shoulders back, and thrust out his narrow chest. He all but burst the one button from his threadbare coat with its neat patches at the elbows.

      And all the while he marched, hobbled, stumbled on, drinking in the martial sound. An occasional policeman would try to kick him away, but he dodged in between the lines, where the soldiers came to look upon him as a joke. They poked him in the ribs with their white-gloved fists, in brutal good nature, but he did not feel it. He followed on ecstatically, with his stern little freckled Scottish face and his puckered-out chest, causing many a smile along the line of march.

      That day he was not afraid to face the biggest policeman on the force. By this time there were big water blisters on his heels, ​and one stocking was hanging down. But that military band was all he saw or heard. When he got big like Sandy McPherson he was going to be a soldier. He was going to bayonet Indians and cannonade cities, and shoot people dead, right through their stomach and insides, and save the general's life at the end of the battle, and get sixteen gold medals, and then—

      But the boy, of a sudden, started, paled, and wilted. The music withered out, the soldiers faded. The gleam left his eye, and the martial poise ebbed from his fallen shoulders. Peering at him from the curb, he saw a pair of cold, green, relentless eyes! The glory and the dream were gone!

      At the next street he fell away from the lines, cut across five side streets, hobbled home, and waited for the green eyes to come back. After that, he knew what would happen. The green eyes came. When the flogging was over he went up to bed without supper. He did n't care very much if it really was true that he was going to be a bad man and a drunkard as his father had ​been. He supposed the green eyes ought to know. But before he fell asleep he showed the Baby, with the broom handle, how to bayonet Indians; whereat the Baby bawled, and she of the green eyes called up the little stairway. Trembling, the boy crept into bed. He felt sore all over.

      Very late that night he heard the green eyes come in and take the penny from his pocket. She held the lamp to his face, but his eyes remained shut. Yet he felt those green eyes burning into him and withering his soul.

      The Iron Age

       Table of Contents

      Layout 4

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      THE IRON AGE

       Table of Contents

      They 'ad a pryer for our 'eathen 'earts

      As they washed us down with suds,

       An' thort as we 'ad a bran' new soul

      W'en they'd burnt our 'Ounds-Ditch duds.

      ​

      THE IRON AGE

      PEGGY was certainly a tomboy. She openly scoffed at "The Pansy Stories" and "Little Wives" and "The Wide, Wide World," but strange to say, devoured all such books as "The Boys' Own Annual," "Deadwood Dick," "The Headless Horseman; or The Terror of Tamaraska Gulch," and any literature on Indians, dire adventure, and bloodshed which came into her hands.

      And many tears were shed over poor Miss Peggy, and many were the solemn and supposedly impressive lectures read to her. But for all those lectures she continued to slide down the banisters, and openly whistle before company. In fact Miss Peggy did not approve of company, and was never happier than when staring the rector's nervous wife out of countenance.

      ​Peggy took an unholy delight in tumbling on the hay in the stables, though Hawkins, the coachman, always was at pains to point out to her that 'orses could never heat 'ay as was trampled on, and artfully, but uselessly, insinuated that a species of horrible green snake abounded in the mows.

      She killed mice and toads without a jot of fear, and could whittle with a jack-knife like a boy. When she cut her finger she tore a piece from the hem of her petticoat, bound up the wound, and went on with her work. She had climbed every tree in the garden, as one might easily know from the tell-tale holes always in her stockings. She also had a passion for scaling the grapevine arbour, against orders, because from the top she could look down into the next yard and make faces at the old gardener there, who was under dark suspicion of having poisoned a Shanghai rooster that had been Peggy's dearly beloved pet for one happy year.

      Teddie, or rather Master Edward Branbury Bronson, who lived two doors distant, was her bosom friend and confidant, and poor ​Teddie it was she slapped, and bullied, and berated, and ordered about in a way that was wonderful to behold. But Teddie's mother was warned by kindly and interested neighbours that the little boy ought not to come in contact with such a wild and unruly child as Peggy. So she straightway forbade the weeping and broken-hearted Teddie to speak to his old playmate, whose parents, she sighed, had utterly ruined the poor child's character.

      But Peggy made a telephone of a ball of waxed string and two tomato tins, and after much climbing of walls and fences and ruining of skirts, it was duly stretched from garden to garden.

      Over this telephone the parted lovers registered vows of constancy and carried on the most delightful and absorbing conversations. And Teddie might never have felt his exile had not the old gardener in the intervening yard discovered the string and innocently made use of it for tying up his currant bushes. For this unpardonable act the old gardener was accosted daily and vindictively with mysterious and unaccountable volleys of ​stones from one side of the garden and green apples from the other. The stones, of course, came from Peggy's side. Miss Peggy never believed in doing things by halves.

      Then followed three

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