As we were thus conversing in a low tone while Old Barley's sustained growl vibrated in the beam that crossed the ceiling, the room door opened, and a very pretty slight dark-eyed girl of twenty or so, came in with a basket in her hand: whom Herbert tenderly relieved of the basket, and presented blushing, as "Clara." She really was a most charming girl, and might have passed for a captive fairy, whom that truculent Ogre, Old Barley, had pressed into his service.
Barley's breakfast for to-morrow, served out to be cooked.
There was something so natural and winning in Clara's resigned way of looking at these stores in detail, as Herbert pointed them out, - and something so confiding, loving, and innocent, in her modest manner of yielding herself to Herbert's embracing arm - and something so gentle in her, so much needing protection on Mill Pond Bank, by Chinks's Basin, and the Old Green Copper Rope-Walk, with Old Barley growling in the beam - that I would not have undone the engagement between her and Herbert, for all the money in the pocket-book I had never opened.
'Taboureau,' said he to me, 'could you sell me a hundred and thirty-seven measures of barley?' 'Why not?' say I, 'that is my trade.
"No," said Benassis, "the barley had passed out of your possession, you were only warehousing it.
"Well, sir, I am called upon to supply the barley at last winter's price.
Let me have twelve jars, and see that they all have lids; also fill me some well-sewn leathern bags with barley meal--about twenty measures in all.
The old woman swore most solemnly that she would not, and when she had completed her oath, she began drawing off the wine into jars, and getting the barley meal into the bags, while Telemachus went back to the suitors.
But after I saw barley grow there, in a climate which I knew was not proper for corn, and especially that I knew not how it came there, it startled me strangely, and I began to suggest that God had miraculously caused His grain to grow without any help of seed sown, and that it was so directed purely for my sustenance on that wild, miserable place.
Besides this barley, there were, as above, twenty or thirty stalks of rice, which I preserved with the same care and for the same use, or to the same purpose - to make me bread, or rather food; for I found ways to cook it without baking, though I did that also after some time.
"Talkin' of chances," said the Governor, "this Sheikh lies about his barley bein' a failure.
They would pass over the brow into the dewless crops where Gihon, low and shrunken, could only guess what they were about when Abu Hussein flew down the bank to scratch at a stopped earth, and flew back into the barley again.
Then, looking up and down the cudgel, he said, "Now, I have in my hand but a splint of wood--a
barley straw, as it were--yet I trow it will have to serve me, so here goeth." Thereupon he cast the cudgel upon the stand and, leaping lightly after it, snatched it up in his hand again.
The heroine of a modern novel is always "divinely tall," and she is ever "drawing herself up to her full height." At the "
Barley Mow" she would bump her head against the ceiling each time she did this.
The Scotch, their distribution of
barley being made, cared very little whether there was or was not any meat in Coldstream.
