The Weathercock Part 39

"I was mistaken perhaps.--A singular people these, so wedded to their restless life. I should like to trace them back and find out their origin. It would be a curious experience to stay with them for a year or two," continued the doctor, after a long silence, "and so find out exactly how they live. I'm afraid that they do a little stealing at times when opportunity serves. Fruit, poultry, vegetables, any little thing they can snap up easily. Then, too, they have a great knowledge of herbs and wild vegetables, with which, no doubt, they supplement their scanty fare. Like to join them for a bit, Vane?"

"Oh, no," said the boy laughing. "I don't think I should care for that.

Too fond of a comfortable bed, uncle, and a chair and table for my meals."

"If report says true, their meals are not bad," continued the doctor.

"Their women are most clever at marketing and contrive to buy very cheaply of the butchers, and they are admirable cooks. They do not starve themselves."

"Think there's any truth about the way they cook fowls or pheasants, uncle?"

"What, covering them all over with clay, and then baking them in the hot embers of a wood fire? Not a doubt about it, boy. They serve squirrels and hedgehogs in the same way, even a goose at times. When they think it is done, the clay is burned into earthenware. Then a deft blow with a stick or stone cracks the burnt clay and the bird or animal is turned out hot and juicy, the feathers or bristles remaining in the clay."

"Don't think I could manage hedgehog or squirrel, uncle."

"I should not select them for diet. They are both carnivorous, and the squirrel, in addition, has its peculiar odorous gland like the pole-cat tribe."

"But a squirrel isn't carnivorous, uncle," said Vane, "he eats nuts and fruit."

"And young birds, too, sometimes, my boy. Flesh-eating things are not particularly in favour for one's diet. Even the American backwoodsman who was forced to live on crows did not seem very favourably impressed.

You remember?"

"No, uncle; it's new to me."

"He was so short of food, winter-game being scarce, that he had to shoot and eat crows. Someone asked him afterwards whether they were nice, and he replied that he 'didn't kinder hanker arter 'em.'"

"Well, I don't 'kinder hanker arter' squirrel," said Vane, merrily, "and I don't 'kinder hanker arter' being a gipsy king ha--ha--as the old song says. You'll have to make me an engineer, uncle."

"Steam engineer, boy?" said the doctor, smiling.

"Oh, anything, as long as one has to be contriving something new.

Couldn't apprentice me to an inventor, could you?"

"To Mr Deering, for instance?"

Vane shook his head.

"I don't know," he said, dubiously. "I liked--You don't mind my speaking out, uncle?"

"No, boy, speak out," said the doctor, looking at him curiously.

"I was going to say that I liked Mr Deering for some things. He was so quick and clever, but--"

"You didn't like him for other things?"

Vane nodded, and the doctor looked care-worn and uneasy; his voice sounded a little husky, too, as he said sharply:--

"Oh, he is a very straightforward, honourable man. We were at school together, and I could trust Deering to any extent. But he has been very unfortunate in many ways, and I'm afraid has wasted a great deal of his life over unfruitful experiments with the result that he is still poor."

"But anyone must have some failures, uncle. All schemes cannot be successful."

"True, but there is such a large proportion of disappointment that I should say an inventor is an unhappy man."

"Not if he makes one great hit," cried Vane warmly. "Oh, I should like to invent something that would do a vast deal of good, and set everyone talking about it. Why, it would mean a great fortune."

"And when you had made your great fortune, what then?"

"Well, I should be a rich man, and I could make you and aunt happy."

"I don't know that, Vane," said the doctor, laying his hand upon the lad's shoulder. "I saved a pleasant little competence out of my hard professional life, and it has been enough to keep us in this pleasant place, and bring up and educate you. I am quite convinced that if I had ten times as much I should be no happier, and really, my boy, I don't think I should like to see you a rich man."

"Uncle!"

"I mean it, Vane. There, dabble in your little schemes for a bit, and you shall either go to college or to some big civil engineer as a pupil, but you must recollect the great poet's words."

"What are they, uncle?" said Vane, in a disappointed tone.

"'There is a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we may.'

"Now let's have a little more botany. What's that?"

"Orange peziza," said Vane, pouncing upon a little fungus cup; and this led the doctor into a dissertation on the beauty of these plants, especially of those which required a powerful magnifying gla.s.s to see their structure.

Farther on they entered a patch of fir-wood where a little search rewarded them with two or three dozen specimens of the orange milk mushroom, a kind so agreeable to the palate that the botanists have dubbed it delicious.

"Easy enough to tell, Vane," said the doctor, as he carefully removed every sc.r.a.p of dirt and gra.s.s from the root end of the stem, and carefully laid the neatly-shaped dingy-green round-table shaped fungi in his basket upon some moss. "It is not every edible fungus that proves its safety by invariably growing among fir trees and displaying this thick rich red juice like melted vermilion sealing-wax."

"And when we get them home, Martha will declare that they are rank poison," said Vane.

"And all because from childhood she has been taught that toadstools are poison. Some are, of course, boy, so are some wild fruits, but it would be rather a deprivation for us if we were to decline to eat every kind of fruit but one."

"I should think it would," cried Vane, "or two."

"And yet, that is what people have for long years done in England.

Folks abroad are wiser. There, it's time we went back."

Vane was very silent on his homeward way, for the doctor had damped him considerably, and the bright career which he had pictured for himself as an inventor was beginning to be shrouded in clouds.

"Civil engineer means a man who surveys and measures land for roads and railways, and makes bridges," said Vane to himself. "I don't think I should like that. Rather go to a balloon manufactory and--"

He stopped to think of the subject which the word balloon brought up, and at last said to himself:

"Oh, if I could only invent the way how to fly."

"The boy has too much gas in his head," the doctor said to himself, as they reached home; "and he must be checked, but somehow he has spoiled my walk."

He threw himself into an easy chair after placing his basket on the table, and into which Aunt Hannah peeped as Vane went up to his room.

"Botanical specimens, my dear," she said.