Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden

staircase. By seven in the evening I was again in request. I was furious at the irony of my lot, for the corpse of a guardsman had caught my childish fancy, and the kingdom of England might have gone to hell for me — I would rather have been strapped to the dead man’s shako than wallow for a week in the royalist Busby in Christendom. But I had passed my word. I resumed the now dis- tasteful task. She has been like this for a month (I heard the Head Surgeon whisper to the German Ambassador, who had ventured to make his en- quiries with his Master John Thursday, or schmeichaz, as he himself would have called it, done up in a solid steel case as a measure of pre- caution.) — John Brown gave up after ten days or so, and since then — he spread his hands in de- spair and the sweat trickled down his cheeks. Yes ; it was up to me, and no mistake. Terrible news came from the south : one of the finest regi- ments in the service had refused to obey the order to proceed north : another had thrown down its arms, and tossed off as one man. Yet a third was so worn by its debauchery with the gilded youth who haunt the Knightsbridge bars that the jury of matrons who examined them decided that to hurry them North was to waste the railway fares, and to raise false hopes in the nation. It was up to me ! Luckily, I was up to it. Hour after hour my gaudy bollocks jerked their wiry emissions into the apparently insatiable cut-and-come-again of this hot-arsed bawdy-basket. Night after night, with short intermissions at the arrival of a posse of con- stables or a naval contingent, did I plunge upon that flabby doodle-sack : but the champion pizzle- skinner of the World was not to be toyed with by a boy of not yet eight years old ! The mouth thank- less swallowed all my hoarded spendings and asked, shrieked, yelled, for more. On the sixteenth day I was feeling weak toward morning, and the [37]