Page:Life's little ironies (1894).pdf/58

The shouts of the village-boys came in at the window, accompanied by broken laughter from loungers at the inn door; but the brothers Halborough worked on.

They were sitting in a bedroom of the master-mill-wright’s house, engaged in the untutored reading of Greek and Latin. It was no tale of Homeric blows and knocks, Argonautic voyaging, or Theban family woe that inflamed their imaginations and sparred them onward, They were plodding away at the Greek Testament, immersed in a chapter of the idiomatic and diffienit Epistle to the Hebrews.

The dog-day sun in its decline reached the low ceiling with slanting sides, and the shadows of the great goat’s willow swayed and interchanged upon the walls like a spectral army manwuvring. The open casement which admitted the remoter sounds now brought the voice of some one close at hand. It was their sister, a pretty girl of fourteen, who stood in the court below.

“I can see the tops of your heads! What's the use of staying up there? I like you not to go out with the street-boys; but do come and play with me!”

They treated her as an inadequate interlocutor, and