Mrs. Holl can neither read nor write herself, but she wants all her children to be able to do so. She has managed to pay for their schooling at the national schools, and has quite a respect for their learning. She listens with breathless delight and interest of an evening while they read aloud by turns from that exciting periodical, the Red Handed Robber of the Black Forest, published weekly at one penny, and to be completed in one hundred and twenty numbers.
Until Mrs. Holl had placed the large dish of steaming potatoes on the table, she was too much absorbed in her occupation to give a thought to any other subject. But just as she had done so, John Holl, who had several times taken his pipe from his mouth, and looked round in a puzzled way, said, “It is very strange, Sairey, but it seems to me just as if some one had been a drinking of spiced beer. Don’t take it amiss, old woman, I don’t mean to say that I think you have been a drinking of it, for you’re not that sort. Still there is something that smells uncommon like spiced beer.”
“Bless me,” Mrs. Holl said, “what a head I have got, to be sure! I do declare I have not told you a word about it, for it slipped clean out of my mind. You are quite right, John, you do smell spiced beer, for Evan has been drinking it. The boy has been in the Serpentine, and came home that wet you could have squeezed the water out of him by the pailful.”
“In the Serpentine!” John Holl exclaimed; “I heard that the ice was too thin to think of going on it. Why, Evan, that was not like you, not a bit, you are generally steady enough. How did you get in? Some foolery, I’ll wager a pot of beer.”
In answer to this appeal from his father, Evan related what had happened; the others gathering round him, and the young ones even leaving off eating their supper to listen, and breaking in with many exclamations of astonishment as he proceeded.
“It was very wrong, Evan,” his mother said, “you might have got yourself drownded, and what should we have said then? Why, Lor, you might have gone under the ice, and we should never have known nothing about what had become of you, till they brought your tray of lollipops home. That would be all we should have had left of you. What should we have done?”